Rumbelows
by William Easley
Summary: What's shakin' Gravity Falls? Earthquakes, or something paranormal? The Mystery Twins are on the case. Set in July, 2016, when Dipper and Mabel are sixteen.
1. Chapter 1

_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them_

* * *

 **R** **umbelows**

 **(July 13-16, 2016)**

* * *

1

The first rumbles came during the little birthday gathering for Soos on the evening of Wednesday, July 13. Melody had baked a cake, Abuelita had cooked all of Soos's favorite foods for dinner, and the family, plus Mabel, Teek, Dipper, and Wendy, had gathered for a quiet celebration.

Soos, sitting with his two kids on his knees and Melody and Abuelita standing behind him, posed for a photo. "It's so good to be able to, like, have a birthday and be happy about it!" he said with his big, buck-toothed smile shining.

And then the blowing out of the candles—Little Soos helped—and the presents. Soos always insisted these be something small, but he loved them all—the warm boots that Melody had bought him ("So good for when it snows! Thank you, my sweet wife!"), the big bag of watermelon Pulparindo candy from Abuelita ("Oh, wow! A taste of Mexico! Thank you, Abuelita!"), the music player and earbuds from Mabel and Dipper ("Dawgs! Now I can listen to my favorite tunes even when I'm asleep!"), and the certificate for a winter's supply of firewood from Wendy ("Oh, Wendy dude! This will, like, warm my heart _and_ my feet!").

Then just as Little Soos was presenting his papa with a birthday card that he had drawn himself (one lopsided circle was the Mystery Shack, another was Soos, and the smaller ones were Melody, Abuelita, Harmony, and Little Soos himself), they heard a deep unfamiliar rumbling, like thunder—but the whole place shook.

"Earthquake!" Melody yelled.

"Just a small one!" Mabel said. "Hey, we get 'em all the time in California! This one felt like maybe a three? Dipper, would you say a three?"

"About that," he said. The shaking had been brief and not even strong enough to rattle the dishes in the cabinets.

"Mr. Pines says there was a heck of a big one years ago," Soos said solemnly. "Back when Mount St. Helens erupted. He says the ash cloud looked way eerie."

They turned on the news, but there was no word of an earthquake or of any devasting volcanic eruptions. "Just a small one, like I said," Mabel pronounced.

Dipper wondered. Ford had discovered that a whole subterranean landscape sprawled deep below Gravity Falls. First, the Gnomes had extensive ranges of tunnels (mostly abandoned now, since the Gnomes had migrated to the surface after raids by the Mole Men back in the previous century). Then far below the tunnels was the Crawlspace, a cavernous realm not as large as the town, but big enough to be impressive and labyrinthine enough to be baffling. It consisted mostly of a sort of monsters' flea market, a space where creatures of the night could, as Stan said, "make a buck."

Dipper wondered if that might have collapsed or partly collapsed. The Crawlspace lay partly beneath the Shack's grounds and extended as far as the outskirts of town. One way in was to pass through Door 13 in Mystic Lane—or you could even access it through the Outhouse of Mystery if you knew how—and if something had happened to it, well, who knew what might literally turn up? Dipper knew that various demonic or semi-demonic creatures hung out in the Crawlspace, including one that stole people's faces. The Hand Witch also occasionally showed up there to sell or trade stuff, and he was almost sure that on his one trip there, he had glimpsed the Hide-Behind. But maybe not.

After the party wound up and Wendy left for home—they were still putting in hard days at the Shack—Dipper took a big flashlight and went out into the woods as far as the bonfire clearing, where he stood and called out for Jeff.

The Gnome showed up a few minutes later. "Hiya," he said cheerfully. "We had a boffo day at the Shack! We've been counting the money people threw to us dancers. We think we've got a thousand quarters, a thousand dollars, and some fives, too! Would you count it for us?"

Dipper laughed. "Sure, I'll be happy to. And I'll buy you some mushrooms with it any time you want."

"Great!" Jeff said, rubbing his hands. The problem with Gnome mathematics was that the ceiling number—the maximum to which Gnomes could accurately count—was somewhere between twenty and fifty. They always ran out of patience and called any large number a thousand.

"I wanted to ask you," Dipper said. "A while ago, we felt this shaking, like an earthquake. Did you guys feel it too?"

"Shaking?" Jeff asked. "Hmm. No, I don't think anybody reported that to the Queen. I could send an emissary to ask the ferals about it—they still live underground and might have noticed it. Want me to do that?"

"No rush, but when you have time. See you tomorrow."

"Shmebulock will bring our money bag for you to count!" Jeff said. "Thanks!"

The Outhouse of Mystery was just a short walk down the trail. Dipper got there, hesitated, and opened the door. If bad news was on the way from the Crawlspace, better to learn it sooner than later.

"Brobro!"

He hadn't expected Mabel to be following him, and he jumped a little. "Sis! I was just, uh—"

"Well, I know you weren't gonna go Number Two!" Mabel said. "Not here. This thing is crazy, and you know it."

That was true. The Outhouse of Mystery didn't operate on the same principles of reality as the rest of the area. For one thing, if you went in and did your business in, say, five minutes or less, when you emerged again, two hours might have passed in the outside world.

And then, too, if you performed a specific ritual and said some specific words, you could use it as an elevator straight to the Crawlspace.

"No, I—well, the earthquake kind of made me wonder—"

"Going down to the caverns, are we?"

"No! Well, I mean I was—but that doesn't mean you need to come, too. We got in trouble there once already, and the creatures don't like it when humans intrude."

"So? We'll stay out of their way," Mabel said. "Broseph, I've got my grappling hook right here. Don't make me use it on you!"

"OK," Dipper said. "But just a quick look. If there's no cave-ins or anything, we're coming straight back."

"Understood!" Mabel said. "Let's find out what's up! Or what's down! Or what's up down there! Or get the low-down on what's up! Come on, Brobro—"

"That's enough," Dipper said.

"Just one more! Let's get down!"

Dipper knew when to give in.

And so . . . they did everything she was demanding.


	2. Chapter 2

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 13-16, 2016)**

* * *

2

Ford had explained to them that the terrible smell inside the Outhouse of Mystery was purposely designed to prevent people from using it as, well, an outdoor toilet. It didn't always work—Grunkle Stan had been known to use the outhouse for its original purpose, and even Dipper had ducked into it a couple of times when he really, really needed to go. It was bearable, as long as you left the door cracked—which kind of defeated the purpose of an outhouse door, but whatever.

"Hold your breath," Dipper advised Mabel.

They went inside, he closed the door, and then he engaged the elevator function. They had the sensation of movement—not necessarily downward movement, just the sense that somehow they were moving in _some_ direction—and then the door latch popped. Dipper turned off his light, leaving them in complete darkness, and he took a breath. The smell was just earthy, not sulfuric, so he thought they'd probably arrived. "I'll check," he whispered.

Cautiously, he pushed the door open, and the constant dim orange light of the Crawlspace* leaked in—but none of the mutter and chatter he'd expected. He opened the door and Mabel joined him. "Where's all the monsters?" she whispered.

He shook his head. They had to creep around a corner to get a view of the bizarre bazaar. The shops and stands all stood as Dipper remembered them, crammed with goods and remarkably uncrammed with customers or shopkeepers. The arms dealer was nowhere in sight, though his barrels of human and not so human appendages waved at them. The _Give a Damn/Take a Damn_ booth, where the so-called Gnome King** sold curses and curse removers, stood abandoned, the door hanging open as if the proprietor had left too hurriedly even to slam it behind him.

"Looks like they left," Dipper said.

"Looks like they ran," Mabel corrected. "Look around, Broseph."

He saw what his sister meant. Scattered about, shopping bags and baskets lay on the ground, their contents spilled, or in some cases, creeping away. "Something . . . must have scared them away," he said.

"What could scare _monsters_?" Mabel whispered.

"Um . . . maybe Toby Determined visited?"

Mabel snorted. "Good one, Brobro. But kinda mean for you."

"Yeah. I guess I'm sort of on edge," Dipper admitted. "Well, as long as we're here, let's look around."

Oddly, they didn't find anyone, human or otherwise. However, on the ledge where the Hand Witch sometimes crouched, they spotted her guard raven. He regarded them with beady eyes.

"Hi," Mabel said, waving. "Mabel Pines, I visit the Hand Witch in her cave now and then, you remember me."

The raven did not say—wait for it—"Nevermore." It did say "So?"

"Um, so I was wondering, what happened here?"

"Everybody left," the bird said.

"Why?" Dipper asked.

"To go somewhere else."

"But what _caused_ them to want to go somewhere else?" Mabel asked.

"They changed their minds about staying here."

That was the trouble with ravens. By the time you could get a straight answer out of one, you were raving yourself.

They told the bird goodbye and poked around. The Crawlspace was a broad honeycomb of a cavern, with niches and dark pockets and unexpected winding passages. "We're not going in any of those," Dipper said. "It would be too easy to get hopelessly lost."

"OK," Mabel said. "So what do we do? Just turn around and go home?" She wiggled her fingers. "Or do a little recreational looting, hmmm?"

"No looting," Dipper said firmly. "You don't want to get the maul chops on our tails."**

"I don't think any of them are still here."

"Still," Dipper said.

They visited the former lair of Mr. What's-His-Face, a demon who specialized in stealing faces—once he had briefly taken both Mabel's and Dipper's. "Former" fit the situation, since Mr. What's-His-Face apparently no longer held the lease on the space—it was now a frame shop, specializing in pinning the blame for crimes ranging from petty to capital on completely innocent people or other sentient creatures.

However, it was as deserted as everywhere else in the strange realm. Dipper and Mabel were on the verge of giving up and returning to the surface when Mabel tilted her head. "I hear . . . something," she said.

Dipper listened. "I don't."

"This way, I think." She led the way to a branch of the Underground River Bank—well, even monsters and demons had to have some medium of exchange if they were doing business—and they went inside. No guards, no tellers—but now Dipper could hear a faint pounding sound.

They followed it and found themselves standing outside the closed metal door of a vault. A number pad beside the chrome handle evidently worked the lock. It had no numbers on the keys, but spiky marks. "What the heck?" Mabel asked.

"Runes," Dipper said. "Futhark runes. It's OK, I can read them."

"Yeah, you would know how to do that." Mabel tapped on the door. "Hey! Is anybody in there?"

"Yah!" the desperate word came back faint and muffled. "Help! I am running out of air!"

Mabel leaned close to the door to shout, "If we let you out, you won't hurt us, will you?"

"Nein! Just don't eat me!"

Dipper yelled, "I don't think you need to worry about that. Uh—what's the combination?"

"Touch these runes as I tell you in order. Each vill glow. Touch the next one before the last one goes out, OK?"

"OK. Ready."

"Wunjo! Ansuz! Berkana! Ansuz! Sowulo! Hagalaz! Now open!"

Dipper punched the buttons in order, they lit up red, and then all turned green, the combination was complete, and he pushed on the handle. He and Mabel tugged, and the great iron door swung open. Somebody pushed from inside—

Like a cannonball, a Gnome shot out of the vault. Except he wasn't dressed in the traditional overalls and red hat, but in a pin-striped black suit, white shirt with gold tie, and he wore thick gold-rimmed spectacles. He looked disheveled and frightened."Whoo! Dot vas a close call—vait, vait, you are mortals? How so?"

"I think," Mabel said, "the phrase you're groping for is 'Thank you!'"

"Hmm? Yah, yah, thanks. But seeing humans here—ach! Has it gone?"

"What?" Dipper asked.

The Gnome adjusted his spectacles and looked around fearfully. "The monster!" he said.

Mabel said, "You sound . . . different. You're not from the Gravity Falls Gnome colony, are you?"

"Me? Nein, I come from Switzerland. I am a Swiss Gnome, the director of this branch bank, yah? Vere are all the peoples?"

"They seem to have left in a hurry," Dipper said.

"Or—the monster ate them!"

"You keep saying 'monster,'" Mabel pointed out. "What monster do you—whoa!"

The ground shook. Here and there, stalactites broke off and crashed to the surface. Dipper nearly lost his footing. As an earthquake, the phenomenon would have been most impressive.

But—

"DOT monster!" screamed the hapless Swiss Gnome.

* * *

*Like every underground space in every fantasy you've ever read about or seen on screen, the Crawlspace produced its own eldritch light. This may have been natural phosphorescence, luminous fungi, or simply narrative convention.

* * *

**The Gnome King was a fraud. At least the title was. Gnomes are ruled by a Queen and never recognize kings. I mean, they'd walk right past this guy in the street and ask each other, "Who was that? Looked sort of familiar, but . . . ." Anyway, he was a Gnome named, it is believed, Mort. To be fair, he was a Gnome Gnwizard who had studied the occult and who probably did have some real skill at cursing or uncursing objects and people. The ability was real. The King stuff was just advertising.

* * *

 _***Maul chops_ are the Crawlspace's security guards. They are roughly the same as human mall cops. Extremely roughly.


	3. Chapter 3

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 13-16, 2016)**

* * *

3

Stanford Pines's week had been difficult. When their airplane took off to return to Portland that evening, he already felt tired. As the chief of an Agency so very secret that sometimes he himself doubted it existed, Ford did not often have to investigate anomalies in person.

This had been one of those infrequent times. A UFO crash report had come in—a rancher who lived near a little town called Tacos, New Mexico, excitedly claimed that a spacecraft had impacted on his land, the local news had picked up the story, and he had begun to attract visitors and state news people. When the Agency got hold of the story, the local Agents had called for backup and help, and Deputy Superintendent Powers had called on Ford for instructions.

Well, first he had to find out what was going on, so he and Lorena had traveled down for a site inspection. It was clear from the get-go that nothing paranormal had happened—no unusual readings on any of the detectors—and yet from a dozen eyewitness accounts, clearly something had streaked across the heavens and plummeted from the sky at a shallow angle and hit with a crash that resounded for miles over the mostly empty plains in that arid part of the state.

Ford and Lorena had established a field command center in an abandoned adobe house in the foothills of the Brazos range, he and a team of Agents had visited the ranch nearby and had isolated the exact point of impact, and after days of searching and more of digging, they had unearthed a suspicious chunk of burned, half-melted metal that had burrowed in some fifteen feet below the surface. Extricating it—it weighed nearly a ton—and then identifying it had been a tedious business.

And it turned out, after all, to be merely a, um, a let's say "weather satellite." A failed one, at that, one that had never settled into the proper orbit but had for twenty years swung round the earth in a wild, eccentric ellpitical orbit that gradually decayed until the man-made object came whistling down at supersonic speed to disturb the peace on an isolated horse ranch to the east of the Brazos Mountains.

Which disturbed Ford's peace, too—after all, the impact site lay not so very far north of Los Alamos, which still clutched a cloak of secrecy even after all these years. Anyway, when the—all right, you won't tell, let's call it what it was—crashed Soviet spy satellite was recovered, it was not a complete one in one piece but a chunk of one still capable of being dismantled to learn what the Soviets had been up to and how far their space optics had been developed in 1995.

The weather satellite story would probably hold—something like that had worked long, long ago down in Roswell—and at most would give online conspiracy theorists something more to theorize about. The agency—the OTHER agency—that Ford turned the discovery over to showed up in NASA garb and with NASA vehicles, and he'd arranged to have some photos taken showing a couple of them posing next to material clearly showing the pile of wreckage to be a U.S. weather-monitoring space craft.

The material had been crafted in a secret lab owned by Ford's Agency. And so it went. People could sleep easier knowing that an outdated weather satellite had plunged back to earth and had harmed no one.

And Ford could get some rest. He dozed on the flight up to Portland, and Lorena considerately let him sleep. Then the moment they had headed out of the airport and toward parking, his phone gave the characteristic stuttering ring that said the Agency was calling.

He sighed. "Would you drive so I can take this, please?"

"Of course," Lorena said. She knew all about her husband's part-time job.

Ford made sure the scrambler was on and then said, "Yes, Dr. Pines here."

"Sir." Deputy Superintendent Powers's voice. "Two things to report. First, the matter of the stolen automobile has been satisfactorily resolved."

"Yes, I knew that," Ford slamming his car door. "By the way, the UFO crash turned out to be something mundane. Southwest 1 will have the reports in to us by tomorrow morning. What else?"

"The second thing may not be anything major, sir. Seismic disturbances near Gravity Falls. Really only tremors, but they don't seem to be associated with a fault line as such and are extremely isolated. I'm only bothering you because you want to keep a close eye on that part of our territory."

"Thank you Deputy. I'll make it a point to check my instruments as soon as we arrive there. Good job."

"Thank you, sir."

"Trouble?" Lorena asked as she started the Lincoln.

"Hmm? No, I should think not. Just ordinary Gravity Falls mysterious bumps in the night."

"Good. So we needn't speed?"

"No, just a normal drive." He yawned. "Lord, it'll still be midnight when we get there. And the report was just of some seismic disturbances. Probably nothing. Anyway, it didn't sound dangerous. Nothing drastic will happen before we get home."

"Just relax," Lorena said. "If you can doze off again, go ahead. I'm fine for the drive."

"You," he said, "are a treasure."

"Oh, I know," she said, smiling.

And they were off into a foggy evening, heading east and toward the Falls.

* * *

The three of them, Mabel, Dipper, and the Swiss Gnome, crouched in a cramped, low-ceilinged minicavern that seemed to have very solid walls, where they had wound up as the earth trembled under their feet.

"Where is everybody?" the Gnome muttered. "Surely all have not been eaten!"

"We found it like this," Mabel said. "What's this we're in, like a little shop or something?"

"Zis room, you mean? It is a place where the Maul Chops put zose whom they wish to question before taking zem downstairs to zer Hindquarters und jail." He shrugged. "Or zometimes it is a pantry where zer Chops store zeir snacks."

"Sometimes a little jail, sometimes a snack bar," Mabel said.

"Yah, zometimes both at zer same time."

That made her blink thoughtfully. "Oh, hey, I'm Mabel Pines, hi, and this is my brother and sidekick Dipper. We're human, but we know all about the paranormal stuff that goes on down here, so we're cool. And you are?"

"Winziger Kobold," the Gnome muttered. "From the Zurich tunnels."

"Oh, so the Zurich Gnomes are still subterranean?" Mabel asked.

"Yah. Nein. I mean, yah, the Kobold branch of Gnomes traditionally a burrowing race is. But most of us today are in zer international banking business, not, you know, the mining so much. So—why are you humans here?"

"These earthquakes are bothering us up on the surface," Dipper said. "My sidekick and I came down to investigate."

"I thought you zer sidekick were."

"We kinda kick each _other's_ sides," Mabel told him. "Winziger, huh? Mind if we call you Win? I'm Mabes and he's Dippingsauce—"

"Dipper will do," Dipper said. "Anyway, we've been investigating the mysteries of Gravity Falls for nearly five years. We're friends with the civilized Gnomes—the ones on the surface—"

"Der vuns zer Gräbers, vot you would say as zer Diggers, call zer Skvirrels," Winziger said. "Zer tree-climbers."

"Yeah, well, our friends call the underground Gnomes the ferals," Mabel said. "Guess they got one of those crazy rivalries going on!"

"I do not really know," Winziger said. "I see Gnomes from time to time, but they are not much for business. My clients are usually the vun-of-a kind creatures. Zer Hide-Behind has an extensive stock portfolio—vhy am I telling you this?"

"Because you're nervous and worried," Dipper told him. "I think the shaking's stopped."

"Yah, until it again starts! Zey say it may be zer Rumbelows again. Not for hundreds of years have they appeared. Zey are deep ones, zer Rumbelows, deep and deadly, zey say. And nothing can destroy one."

"I think maybe we ought to retreat," Dipper said.

"Retreat? Never!" Mabel said.

"—to find out what we're dealing with!" Dipper told her. "I've never heard of a Rumbelow. I ought to consult the Journals."

"You have a place of safety?" Winziger asked.

"Well, safer than this," Dipper said. "It's on the surface. And you'd be among humans, but—well, we're used to Gnomes now, and nobody would treat you badly."

"Zen let's go and you can do zis research."

"Come on," Dipper said, leading the way out of the small cavern.

"Aw," Mabel complained.

"There's a time and a place," Dipper said. "And this is neither."

He remembered they had to make a left turn at the arms dealer's shop—when they passed it, they saw that the last tremor had overturned at least one barrel of arms, and they were dragging themselves around by the fingers, probably seeking handouts. They had to step over a couple.

"Now there's kind of a tight squeeze here—" Dipper said and broke off.

He was facing a wall of rubble.

"The ceiling fell in," Mabel said.

Yes. There had been a cave-in. And now the narrow tunnel leading to the exit was completely choked off.

"I think," Dipper said, "we may be trapped."

And the earth began to shake again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 13-16, 2016)**

* * *

4

One problem with being x-hundred feet under the ground is that cell reception is lousy. Well, to be even more accurate, non-existent, really. That was the first thing that Mabel checked. She put her phone back inside her sweater and muttered, "How do monsters make phone calls?"

"Zey generally don't," Winziger said. "Very unsocial, most monsters are. Very very few of them will even touch anything as human as a telephone. But some of zem have zer magical ways of communicating, you know. Orbs of speaking and seeing. Or zey send fairygrams."

"Fairy-whats? What are those?" Mabel asked eagerly. They were roaming again, seeking an alternate way out, passing deserted shelves and nooks and crannies, most of them still piled with merchandise. Dipper checked out a couple of side tunnels, but none looked promising, and none had the scent of fresh air.

"Fairygrams?" Winziger asked. "Oh, you know, some fairies make a living hiring zemselves out as messengers. You pay one, tell it your message and who it's for, zer fairy goes off zippy-flying to zer recipient and repeats your message. Fairies can find anyone, anywhere. It is one of their magical talents."

"I did not know that," Mabel said. "Very nearly fascinating."

"Whoa!" Dipper stopped so suddenly that Mabel blundered right into him. "Oof. Hold it. Look up ahead. Do you see it?"

"Yeah. What's that ominous pool of red light doing lying there right in our way?" Mabel asked. "And what is it?"

"It is very hot rock," Winziger said. "Red-hot. Nearly molten. Oh, my gosh, I hope it isn't the Rumbelow!"

"What happened to your accent?" Dipper asked.

Winziger seemed to flinch, but in the dimness it was hard to tell for sure. "Ach, nozzink. Here again it is, you zee?"

"No, no, you were talking just like a Gnome!" Dipper insisted. "No Swiss accent, no nothing, just plain English—as good as Jeff speaks."

"I do not know zis Jeff."

Mabel shoved Dipper, not hard. "Brobro! Treat our guest from foreign shores—wait, does Switzerland have shores?"

"It is, um, across zer sea," Winziger muttered. "What do you think? I mean zink?"

"OK, you're from Zurich. Tell me, what's on the corner of Gessnerallee and Silhstrasse?" Dipper demanded.

"Um—I have not to Zurich been for a long time—"

"It's been there for a long time," Dipper said.

"Um . . . a happy little restaurant?"

Dipper snorted. "I was right. You're not Swiss at all."

Winziger sighed. "Well, no, not technically. But it's incredibly hard for a Gravity Falls Gnome to get a job as a banker."

Mabel asked, "What is at the corner of—"

"The Zurich Casino," Dipper said. "Grunkle Stan told us all about it. But I'm not even sure this guy's a Gnome. To be a banker, he'd have to know—you-know-what."

In the dimness, Mabel looked sly. "Hey, Win! How much is fifteen thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars plus ten per cent?" she demanded.

Winziger automatically said, "Sixteen thousand, seven hundred seventy-five."

"You're no Gnome!" Dipper said.

"I—I'm a Kobold, I—I—"

"Come off it," Mabel said. "If you were a real Gnome, you couldn't have done the math! The Mystery Twins trap another perp! Ha!"

"Ease off, Mabel," Dipper said. He turned to the small figure. "What are you?"

"I'm a Gnome who can do math," Winziger replied with a deep sigh. "That's my shame. OK, I'm a freak! I admit it! Nobody wants me, not the civilized Gnomes, not the Ferals, because the one thing I'm good at, nobody thinks is necessary. So years and years back, I found a place here, but I had to pretend to be a foreigner, a Kobold, to get it. Don't tell anybody, please."

"Huh, a freak Gnome," Mabel said. "What are the odds?"

"About ninety-nine to one against," Winziger said.

"So you're not really a Kobold?" Dipper asked.

The Gnome shrugged. "Who knows? I may have some Kobold in me. They're just a tribe of Gnomes living in northern Europe, really."

"How long have you been a banker down here?" Mabel asked him.

Winziger scratched his close-trimmed beard. "Let me see. Fifty-one years, five months, and sixteen days. It took me ages to work up to the directorship. I had to wait until the old one retired. He was an Abacagator."

Mabel started to ask, "What's an abra—"

"We don't want to know," Dipper said. "Win, you're right about the spot ahead. I can feel the heat from here. What's going on? Why's it heating up? Is it like a magma tube or—what?"

"I honestly don't know," Winziger confessed. "But I think it's a Rumbelow. I mean, you hear all sorts of tales about Rumbelows—they're dragons that breathe fire, or they excrete acid that melts rock, or—all kinds of things. If anybody disappears, a Rumbelow got him. If there's a cave-in, a Rumbelow did it. They eat mole men. They eat bogie-boos. They eat Gnomes. They eat everybody. They can turn invisible—"

"This is interesting," Mabel said. "But I should point out the fact that the red patch up ahead is moving."

Dipper squinted, then pushed them back down the tunnel. "You're right. It's slowly revolving, like a whirlpool. Streaky, sort of. I don't think it's rock at all. I think it's some kind of glowing serpent coiled up in a hollow in the rock."

"Let's get out of here," Winziger said. "Very quietly."

They retreated five steps (for Dipper, anyway) before something happened. A cylindrical, reddish, dull- glowing _something_ the girth of a telephone pole and about ten feet long, tapering down to a blunt tip, rose from the pool of light, wavered, and then crashed down hard. A _boom_ echoed through the Crawlspace, and the ground shook. Then the thing, whatever it was, sank back into the pool of light and the heat grew intense, the circular glow a white-hot glare, too unbearably bright to look at directly.

Hissing, billowing vapor boiled out of the pool, and Dipper could hear the molten rock at the edges bubbling. The heat struck him like a fist. They hurried back, stumbling and gasping. And down at the pool of light, something else reared up—a head as big as a compact car raised itself, dripping streamers of white-hot molten stone. The mouth gaped, revealing teeth bigger than any shark's, but just as sharply triangular. And yellow eyes swept the darkness. Perhaps it spotted them, because the eyes seemed to focus. The mouth opened and the thing roared, a soul-searing bellow, a screech, a cough all rolled into one.

"I think we better run!" Dipper said.

And he turned and discovered that the other two had already taken his advice. They were nowhere in sight.

* * *

"Phone message," Lorena Pines said as she and Stanford carried their suitcases into their house. She picked up the blinking handset and looked at the caller I.D. "Soos, just a few minutes ago."

"What? It's nearly midnight. I'll see what he wants." Stanford took the phone from her and pressed the call-back button.

"Dr. Pines?" It was Soos's voice, uncharacteristically tense.

"Yes, Soos. What's wrong?"

"Uh, excuse me, but do you, like, know where Dipper and Mabel are? Because they're not here."

"No, we haven't heard from them," Ford said. "Have you checked with Stanley?"

"Uh, he's not back from New Jersey, Dr. Pines. And I called Wendy, and she doesn't know where they are, either. Neither one of them is answering their phones. I mean, their car is still here, but they just walked off or some deal and I can't find them."

"I'll be right up." He told Lorena in a few words what was happening, and she said, "I'll come up in a minute. Let me just put the suitcases away."

Stanford walked up the hill, across Stanley's yard, and then up another rise, coming out not very far from the family entrance to the Mystery Shack. Something big grunted at him from the darkness, alarming him—and then he realized it was either Waddles or Widdles, one of Mabel's pigs. The creature nuzzled him as if trying to push him.

Soos opened the door. "We're worried, like sick," he said. "It's not like them to just go off like this!"

"Perhaps they're investigating something," Stanford said. "Have they been—whoa!"

He stumbled as a tremor rippled through the earth. Soos hung onto the doorframe. "Maybe it's that, Dr. Pines!" he said. "We've been having, like, swarms of little earthquakes like that one. We were wondering about it earlier."

"I'm not sure it—umph!—was an—umph! What is it, pig?"

From the other side of the Shack came a piercing but distant squeal.

Soos said, "Oh, Dr. Pines, dude, that's Waddles! He's off on the Mystery Trail or some junk! I'll bet Widdles wants you to follow her. Let me get a flashlight!"

By the time he got back, Lorena had joined Ford. "You go," she said. "I'll help hold down the fort here. See what Widdles is trying to show you."

Ford, now worried sick, had a momentary hysterical urge to say, "Maybe Timmy's in the well!" But two things stopped him: He knew very well that in the classic TV series, not once had Timmy ever been in a well, so the statement would have been counter to fact. And the second thing was that a possibility involving the Bottomless Pit had flashed through his mind. Oh, Stanley had told him that living things shot back out of the Pit twenty-two minutes after falling in, but still—

Soos came back with two flashlights, and they followed the urgings of Widdles down the Mystery Trail, past the bonfire clearing. Waddles had stationed himself at the door of the Outhouse of Mystery and was oinking anxiously.

"Uh-oh," Ford said. "If they went in there, they're either held in a time differential, or they've been pulled down into the Crawlspace." He opened the door—

And a thick cloud of heated steam rolled out, stinking of sulfur and quivering as another mini-earthquake shook everything around them.


	5. Chapter 5

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 13-16, 2016)**

* * *

5

"The way is blocked," Ford said, closing the outhouse door again. "Apparently on the lower end. I'm not sure what might have happened."

"We gotta help Hambone and Dipper!" Soos said, sounding as if he were on the edge of panic. "You're, like, good at thinking, Dr. Pines. Think of something!"

Ford did. He made the mystic sign of the Voor and a Gnome popped up in response. "Listen," he said to the Gnome. "I need information about the Crawlspace."

The Gnome shrugged. Ford put his thumb and forefinger under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Let me see . . . Gnomish. Um, _tha keovid kalor um da Nerroth Yarred._ "

The Gnome looked shocked, but he said something that sounded like, " _Uthuk keovid Hernrik da bergukli eron Elger pwdyr. Tha var Mer Fraed_ ," and hurried away.

"What's up, Dr. Pines?" Soos asked. "He was speaking French!"

"The Gnome is—wait, what? That was Gnomish, not French! Anyway, the Gnome's going to bring back one of his fellows who sometimes sells fairy dust down in the Crawlspace," Ford said. "That's illegal among Gnomes, by the way."

Gnomes can move fast when they want to, and within just a few seconds, the first Gnome returned with a scraggly-bearded, grumpy-looking, scowling Gnome who had the shifty look and the edgy bearing of a fugitive from justice. Ford spoke to him in English, and he looked uneasy. In a phlegmy voice, he growled, "Look, I could be in big trouble if the cops found out. You're not a cop, are you? 'Cause if you are, you gotta tell me."

"I am not a cop," Ford said firmly. "I'm just looking for information so I can find my missing niece and nephew."

The Gnome considered this for a few seconds. "What's in it for me?"

Ford leaned way down and whispered something. The Gnome, Hernrik, asked, "You're not stringing me along? For real?"

"A dozen, if your information helps," Ford said.

The little humanoid shrugged. "Don't know as this'll be any help, but somethin' dangerous has closed down the Dark Market. The older merchants say it's somethin' called a Rumbelow, causes earthquakes and fires. Don't know much about it myself. You might see if an older monster could help."

"Recommend one."

"Umm . . . the Handwitch," Hernrik suggested. "She's been sellin' stuff down there for a thousand years. She's got her fingers in a lotta pies, you know what I mean. Try her. I still get the you-know-whats?"

"Visit the Mystery Shack in a day or two. I'll deliver." Hernrik nodded and grinned and vanished in the way of his kind (shady characters, that is, not Gnomes), and Ford said to Soos, "Let's get back to the Shack. I have to make a call. Oh, and remind me to send someone out butterfly hunting tomorrow."

Soos said, "If you need to borrow it, I got my phone."

Ford shook his head. "Phones are of no use for the kind of call I have to make. Come on! Hurry!"

They practically jogged back to the Mystery Shack—Soos carried a lot of weight, but he could hustle—and then Ford excused himself, told Lorena briefly what was up, and dived down into his laboratory.

"Scrying ball, scrying ball," he muttered down on the second level, rummaging through a pile of odds and ends that one of these days he planned to straighten up. Then he beamed as his six-fingered hand closed upon a six-inch diameter globe (coincidence, that) of pure, clear crystal.

He found a black velvet cloth, folded and twisted it into a kind of nest on a lab table, and set the crystal inside it. Then he pulled up a stool, bent close, and murmured the ancient Romani chant, " _Buna sefule. Vreau să sun."_ That meant, roughly, "Hello, Operator, I want to place a call."

The orb pulsed with a violet light, and the image of a face, that of an inhuman woman, shimmered into view. "What party do you wish to call, please?"

Ford said hurriedly, "I need to talk to—oh, wait, is that you, Myrt?"

Inside the scrying ball, the strangely slanted eyes lit up. "Stanford! Long time no see, sweetie! You're looking well!"

"Thank you, feeling well. How's every little thing?"

"Oh, you know, you plug away. So good to see you again! Hey, it's a crazy night, but sometime when the lines aren't so busy, give me a call, will ya?"

"Sure thing, Myrt. But right now, I need to talk to the Handwitch, Handwitch Mountain, Gravity Falls Valley."

"Certainly. Let me get that number for you. OK, got it. One moment, please."

The orb's glow momentarily faded, and then a human face, a man's face, showed up. "Yes, what is it?"

Wondering if he'd gotten a wrong orb, Ford replied, "I need to speak to the Handwitch. This is someone she knows, Stanford Pines, Gravity Falls. It's rather urgent."

"She's my wife. Just a minute. Hey, Sweetie Face? Orb for you."

"At this witching hour?" a harsh sort of woman's voice said.

"He says it's, uh, Stanford Pines, and it's urgent."

"Oh, all right, I'll take it. Here, hand it to me. Why don't you go to the kitchen and brew me a nice cup of cobweb tea, Plum Buns?"

"OK. Wuv you!"

"Wuv oo too, dearest!" The Handwitch's face replaced the man's. She didn't look happy. "Stanford Pines, I don't appreciate being bothered at this—wait a minute. You're not Stanford. You look like him, but—"

"I am Stanford!" Ford insisted. "I understand you had a run-in with my twin brother, Stanley, over a wristwatch, if I remember correctly. I was here first! Here in Gravity Falls, I mean. I visited your lair and interviewed you many years ago."

"Oh, right, right," she said. "I wondered how you ever turned so cranky and selfish! Twins, huh! I would never have guessed. What do you need, dearie?"

"Information about the Crawlspace," Ford said quietly.

In the scrying glass, the Handwitch flinched and looked sharply to her right. Then she murmured, "Keep it low. Rupert doesn't know everything about my work. For the sake of my marriage, I want to keep it that way. Listen, the Crawlspace is closed until further notice, OK?"

"I gathered that," Ford said. "But my niece and nephew, Mabel and Mason Pines, may be trapped down there."

"Mabel?" the Handwitch asked. "Oh, my goodness! She's a friend of mine! She helped me hook up with Rupert some years back!"

"Then for Mabel's sake, tell me what's happening down there," Ford said. "It's urgent."

"Just a sec, hon." She looked away again. "Oh, Rupie, dearest, do we have some greenwasp honey? I'd just love a spoonful in my tea."

Faintly, Ford heard the sounds of a pantry being rummaged and then the man's reply: "Um . . . don't see any, Sugar Lips. Want me to go down cellar and fetch a fresh jar?"

"Oh, would you? That would be so sweet of you, Lambie Pie!" In a moment, her face came close to the orb again. "All right, Stanford, very quickly—once every few centuries, a creature from what the Gnomes call the Unspeakable Depths appears in the caverns and tunnels below Gravity Falls. It's called the Rumbelow—or maybe there's more than one, I don't know. While Rumbelows are down there, nothing is safe—if you don't get burned to a crisp, the poisonous vapors suffocate you. The Gnomes always fled their tunnels when one was about. The Rumbelows also cause earthquakes and cave-ins, too. After a few days of rampaging, they mysteriously vanish back into the unknown again and don't return for a hundred, three hundred years. They leave behind charred ruins, the carbonized skeletons of any victims, and craters melted out of solid rock. That's what you're up against."

"How do I fight it?"

After an uneasy pause, the Handwitch said sadly, "Honey, I don't think you can!"


	6. Chapter 6

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 13-16, 2016)**

* * *

6

Down in the Crawlspace, Dipper led the way. Like him, Mabel had come down from the surface by the alternate route to the Crawlspace once before, or rather, part of her had—her face. However. Mr. What's-His-Face had tucked it into a satchel, and she hadn't seen anything of the journey, though she did recall that the inside of the satchel smelled of mothballs and morning breath.

So, for a change, Mabel relied on Dipper's sense of direction without taking one of her instinct-based shortcuts. "It's this way, I think," he said, coughing. The air in the Crawlspace was getting increasingly thick with acrid, acidic vapors that burned his nose and throat. "I seem to remember that when Pacifica and I slid down the passageway from Door 13 on Mystic off Main Street, we landed close to that." He pointed.

"That" was a heavyweight blue canvas awning with paler blue canvas sides and a sign outside it reading "The Non-Exist-Tent." Dipper had no idea what, if anything, existed inside it and at the moment, he didn't care to find out. He looked around. "Let me see—I remember after we two slid down from the doorway, I saw that tent on our right, so—" he turned so the tent was off to his right, then walked backward, lined up on the sign and the tent, and finally turned around. "This way now. Should take us straight to it."

A hundred steps down the side tunnel, they came to something that looked a bit like a playground slide made of smooth stone, except it issued from a dark tunnel that led more or less straight up. Dipper knelt and aimed his flashlight up inside it. "Yeah, this is it."

"Let me see," Mabel said, worming under his arm and craning to look upwards. "This? Yuck! It's all glistening, slimy muscle and drippy teeth! Like the inside of a throat, but with fangs! It's more like a gullet than an exit!"

"Yeah, kind of like the Sarlac pit," Dipper agreed. "But it's the best we can do, so we gotta try."

"I don't think I can climb that," Win said, standing beside Mabel and gazing upward. "I'm not very athletic. And before I came down to the Crawlspace, I fell out of trees a lot. The other young Gnomes laughed at me."

"Aw," Mabel said. "I'll bet they called you names, too. Wouldn't let you join in any Gnome kid games, huh?"

"I felt like a real misfit," Win mumbled. "That's why I decided to go feral. But after finding the old Gnome tunnels, I wound up a long way below the Gnome levels, because—well, never mind. It was a mean trick the other ferals played on me, and I fell for it. For about two hundred feet. Can you climb this tunnel, Dipper?"

"No handholds," Dipper muttered. "And everything's slippery. Let me see, though—maybe here at the bottom of the drop we can get cell reception."

He stared at his phone and even tried going into Wi-Fi search. It did no good. No, they couldn't get any kind of reception.

Mabel began to retreat into grumpy Mabel mode: "Aw, man! We need a fairy to take a fairygram for us! Where all them fairies at? Never one around when you need one!"

"They were about the first ones to evacuate the Crawlspace," Win said. "When the Rumbelow first broke through in the Round Square, they knew what was coming and warned the others, but then they all took off."

"How'd they get out?" Dipper asked.

Win pointed vaguely upward. "By their own way. They took the ferry."

"There's a river?" Mabel asked. "Where is it?"

Shaking his head, Win said, "No, it's not a water ferry, it's an air ferry."

Eagerly, Mabel asked, "Ooh, flying! Can we take it?"

Win just shrugged. "No, that's impossible. I mean, even I'm way too big for it. It's really only a fairy air ferry."

"Kind of small, huh?" Dipper asked absently, still fruitlessly using his flashlight and seeking some way to go up the evidently living gullet-tunnel.

"Tiny for you humans. Small for us Gnomes. Fair-sized if you're a fairy," Win said.

Mabel said, "Let me get this straight, now. So it's for fairies a fair-sized fairy air ferry."

"Let's . . . just stop this now," Dipper pleaded. He tried climbing up the tube, but Win was right—the thing was just too broad in diameter for him to chimney up, and the sides were way too smooth and slick to offer any handholds, not to mention feeling like warm living flesh. If Jonah had tried climbing up the whale's throat, which he didn't, it would have felt like that. "Sorry," Dipper said. "I guess this is a no-go."

Mabel shoved him aside, rolling up her sweater sleeves. "Wait, Brobro! We have a secret weapon! You're forgetting my—"

"Dexterity?" Dipper asked.

"—grappling hook! Yes!" she pulled it, aimed it up the tube, and fired. At first it seemed promising, because when she tugged, the hook grappled _something_. She pulled harder, and the entire fleshy-like tube quivered. It made a sound like a cat working hard to hork up a hairball. Once more, Mabel pulled on the rope, hard. "I think we can try it!"

But before she could climb, the passageway went "Blechhhh!" The grapple clanged out, followed by a gooshy gush of sour-smelling, greasy liquid.

"You made it vomit," Dipper said, hastily backing off.

"Yeah, about four gallons," Mabel agreed, gingerly stepping back from the spreading greenish puddle. She sounded disgusted, but immediately hit a brighter tone: "Well, I didn't get us out, but I gained one thing."

"What?" Win asked.

"A goal for the next time I'm airsick."

"We can't get out this way, anyhow. Let's move," Dipper said. "The smoke's getting thicker. Is there a lower level, Win?"

The Gnome sounded hesitant: "Well, yes, some runnels, a couple dozen of them, but—I don't know if we want to try that."

"The vapors rise up," Dipper pointed out, flashing his light overhead, where streamers of coiling fumes crept along the tarnished underside of the ceiling like blind and lazy snakes. "Right now, the main thing is to get to fresher air down under them."

"What's a runnel?" Mabel asked.

"Huh? Oh, like a human subway," Win said. "I mean, no trains or anything, but footpath tunnels to run quickly from place to place without surface traffic to interfere, you know. Passages that lead to different hubs of the Crawlspace. Like we're in the market section now, but there are storage houses, residences for some of the subterranean permanents, a guard house where the Maul Chops have their headquarters—"

"Maul Chops," Dipper said. "Big guys? Green? Two horns? Only one eye? Wear spiked, armored shoulder pads?"

"Sounds like them," Win agreed.

Dipper added one last observation: "Dumb as a bag of rocks?"

"Yes! That's definitely the Maul Chops Corps," agreed Win.

Dipper said, "OK, Paz and I met one of the guards when we were here last. Mabel, those guys are huge! Like seven feet tall! So the guard house should be big enough for us all to shelter there. Can you lead us to it, Win?"

"I _think_ so," the Gnome said, though he sounded doubtful. "I've only ever been there once, though—don't look at me like that, I wasn't arrested! But a smartbutt tried to get change for a counterfeit Galleon in the bank, and I had to go down to testify against him and bring his remains back up in a bag."

"What's a smartbutt?" Mabel asked.

"Huh? Oh, it's a bipedal creature that looks like a butt on legs, nothing else."

"Where does it keep its money?" she asked.

"You don't want to know. Anyhow, despite the name, they're not really very smart. I mean a Galleon, really? It's an imaginary unit of exchange!"

"Take us to the guard house!" Dipper said. The ceiling of the caverns was beginning to acquire a coating of what looked like oily black soot. And his flashlight was sending out a visible cone of green-tinged light as the air got progressively worse.

They followed Win as the Gnome trotted along to a side tunnel not far from his bank. "I think . . . it's down one of these side tunnels," he said, pulling up short in a circular chamber. Across from them were the mouths of three dark tunnels. He pointed tentatively. "The . . . right one."

"Let's go," Dipper said.

Win caught his jeans leg to stop him. "Or, wait—no, no, I remember distinctly, not the right, but the left one! Definitely the left!"

"Come on," Dipper said, heading in that direction.

Win scratched his close-trimmed beard. "Or maybe . . . the middle?"

"Just pick one!" Dipper ordered.

So they went with the middle and hoped for the best.


	7. Chapter 7

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 13-16, 2016)**

* * *

7

 **From the Journals of Stanford Pines:** _Thursday, 14/07/2016: It is morning now, let me check, 0835 hours, and we have found no trace of Mason and Mabel except for the pigs tracking them to the paranormal structure that my brother calls "the outhouse of mystery."_

 _I must not panic. Unreasoning fear is the enemy of rational thought. Let me see if I can clear my mind a little. I have had very little sleep in the past 24 hours. All right, mundane matters: Stanley and Sheila are on their way back to the Falls from Portland, having just landed. I have apprised them of the situation. They will help Soos cover the activity at the Mystery Shack today. The show must go on._

 _I have consulted my Journals. They offer no clue that I can grasp. I do have an alternative, reluctant though I am to employ it. The face-stealing demon is currently in stasis in my secret bunker. I can release him from stasis and offer him freedom on two conditions: First, he must help me find a way into the Crawlspace. Second, he must ply his trade elsewhere, not in Gravity Falls._

 _But I have had bad experience trusting demonic entities before. However, I have wrestled with the problem since last night and see no other approach. Therefore, despite my trepidation, I will go to the bunker and release him in the containment room. When I "froze" him, he was in a screaming rage, and I expect he will emerge from stasis in the same state—though he went into suspended animation four years ago by our count, no time will have passed for him._

 _However, my examination shows he has no paranormal abilities that might enable him to escape the containment room. He cannot teleport, he has no mind-control talents, and so on. I may have to let him work out his anger, but there is nothing in the containment room he can either break or use as a weapon._

 _So—here I go, to discover if it is even possible to reason with a creature whose very existence is unreasonable. I hope I can succeed all on my own. Fiddleford's too old to take with me, and—there is no one else._

 _I feel so lonely._

* * *

"You shouldn't even be here," Stanford said to Wendy Corduroy.

"Nuts to that," she said grimly. It was a turn of phrase she'd picked up from her father. "My boyfriend's trapped in some dumb underground dungeon or some biz, and I'm supposed to let you go find him on your own? No way, Dr. P."

"I shouldn't have even told you where I was going when you first got out of your car and saw me setting out on the trail."

"Water under the bridge, man. Want me to climb up the tree and move the lever?"

"No, that won't be necessary. I—wait, what?" Ford stopped in his tracks and stared at Wendy. She was dressed for work, tan slacks, white shirt, green blazer and did not, at the moment, look like a formidable lumberjack girl. "You _did_ that?"

"Yeah, it's how me and Soos and Mabel and Dipper first got down there. When we found the Shapeshifter was loose."

"I—that is remarkable," Stanford said. "That lever was literally a last-resort failsafe, in case the electronics failed. No, I have a remote to unlock the bunker, but thank you."

"Your idea to put in the lever?" Wendy asked.

"Um, actually, it was Fiddleford's. He always believed in back-up systems to back-up systems. How did you even learn about the emergency lever?"

"Meh, the tree's made of _metal_ , man. And that one limb doesn't look natural if you concentrate on it. By the way, you need to touch up the paint job on the trunk." Wendy pointed. "See, there's some streaks of metal showing through."

"I'll get a crew on it," Ford said. He reached in his pocket and took out his keyring. One of the keys was a blank—black rubber guard on the head, but no teeth at all on the shaft. Instead of using it as a normal key, Ford aimed it at the fake tree and squeezed the head. It chirped, and the ground quivered a little as a circle around the trunk irised open and heavy wood beams chunked out of the walls of the resulting hole to form a spiral staircase.

Ford's key also controlled the lights, and he and Wendy walked down and into the anteroom, even dustier than it had been on Wendy's first trip down. She muttered, "Uh, there was a fallout shelter sign on the wall here. I kinda ripped it off. It's hangin' over my bed if you want it back."

"No point, really," Ford said. "It was originally intended to keep any possible intruders from exploring farther, but save for you and your friends, there have never been any intruders. Come on. We have to go through the Symbol Trap room, and that means we have to move quickly. Step only on the tiles where you see me step or the walls will close in."

"Tell me about it," Wendy said.

They avoided triggering the crushing walls, though it involved tricky footwork. Fortunately, as Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, and Soos had discovered, once you were through into the main laboratory space of the bunker, the door on this side closed, the device re-set, and going through it from inside to outside did not trigger the death-trap.

Mr. What's-His-Face had been ensconced in a cryochamber separate from that of the Shapeshifter, a smaller one. "Ew," Wendy said as she and Ford entered the control room. "Is that thing him?"

Ford made sure the vault-like door into the chamber was closed and locked and then switched on all the lights. "That's him. I undressed him to examine his body. Um, you probably shouldn't look."

"Dude," Wendy said, "he just looks like a purple big-mouthed frog!"

Which was true. The creature, frozen in mid-stride, had a slim froggy body with tiny webbed feet, skinny arms ending in five-fingered hands stretched out as though ready to clutch something—the fingers ended in what looked like sucker pads—no neck distinct from the body, and an enormous mouth full of teeth—eight incisors (one of which, on the top right of the mouth, was gold), the rest molars, no canines. No visible eyes, nose, or ears.

"It may come out of stasis in a blind fury," Stanford warned. "It could rip a human to bits."

"You think?" Wendy asked. "Dr. P., the teeth are those of a herbivore."

Stanford had turned a key in a panel and had pressed a series of buttons. His six-fingered hand poised over a massive lever. "Indeed," he said, his voice full of surprise and wonder. "Do you know, I failed to notice that before? You're an observant young woman, Miss Corduroy."

"I'm gonna be your grand-niece by marriage one day," Wendy said. "I think you can start calling me 'Wendy' at any time. Come on, get that critter movin'. We gotta find Dipper."

"Very well." With a grunt of effort, Stanford threw the switch. The lights dimmed a little. Then energies crackled in the containment room, the cryo-tube opened wide, and the monster lurched forward, screeching—only to screech, literally, to a halt. Even without eyes, it seemed to look around wildly.

Ford spoke into a microphone: "You're a prisoner in a room from which there is no escape. However, if you will be reasonable, we can discuss terms of your release."

The creature darted right up to the heavy window and threw himself at it, which was a mistake, since the window was made of armor-piercing-shell-proof glass (one of Ford's more lucrative patents, in fact). It bounced off, rolled on the floor clutching its head—probably its head, anyway—and then gibbered before staggering back to its feet and suddenly doing a double-take. "There's a _girl_ in there!"

"You got it," Wendy said into the mike. "And one that's chopped up uglier things than you!"

"Where are my _clothes_?" the monster wailed, hunkering down and hugging its knees, though it lacked visible genitalia, just as it lacked visible eyes. "Please give me my clothes!" it begged.

"The clothes you were wearing," said Ford, "are hanging on the rack directly beside the cryotube, which is the device immediately behind you."

"Get dressed, I won't look," Wendy added.

The creature scuttled back, found the rack of clothes, and grabbed them, sending coat hangers flying—black trousers, a green-plaid short, swallow-tailed jacket with an enormous hood that covered most of his head, shoes with—spats? Yes, black shoes, white spats. And brown gloves. Dressed, it stood up and, possibly, stared at the window that protected Ford and Wendy. "I had a hat," it said plaintively.

"A derby," Ford replied. "Yes, I forgot about the hat. It's—oh, here it is, on a shelf." He took down a child-sized hat, at least twenty-one sizes too small for that blunt head. "Listen to me: You collect faces."

"It's not _personal_ ," the creature said defensively. "It's strictly business."

"Why do you do it?" Ford asked.

The creature wheedled, "I got to make a living, don't I? Stranded here in this weird dimension—"

"You came from a different dimension? Which?" Ford asked.

"You wouldn't have heard of it. It's called 618/F. I was just minding my own business one day and everything buzzed, and then here I was in this valley. No family, no friends, none of my own kind to mate with—I had to do something!"

"Hmm. Listen, there's just a possibility that I can find a way to return you to your own realm," Ford said. "I can't promise anything, but I swear I'll try. However, at the very least, I can offer you your freedom, if you agree to certain conditions. First, you won't be allowed to collect human faces any longer. What you do among the paranormal creatures is outside my jurisdiction, but no more human prey, all right?"

"Aw. Those faces bring the best prices."

"Dude," Wendy said, "think about it. You say no, you stay here, no more collecting _anything,_ get it?"

The creature sagged. "Yeah. OK. I guess I have to face up to it. So are we good?"

"Not quite. Next, you have to take me to the Crawlspace. Something bad is happening there, and our friends appear to be trapped underground."

The monster became alert and wary. "What bad?"

Ford explained, to the best of his knowledge, and told about the rush of polluted steam he and Soos had encountered.

"Earthquakes and heat," Mr. What's-His-Face muttered. "Sounds like a Rumbelow. I heard about them, but I've never seen one. You only run into one every thousand years or so, they say. Dragons of some type, they say. That's bad. The air they breathe out has poisons in it."

"I'll take gas masks," Ford said. "Can you get us down there?"

"Probably. We can use the delivery entrance. I got a key—yeah, still here in my coat pocket."

"Very well. Give me a few minutes to gather some equipment. I warn you, both of us will be armed, and we don't fully trust you. One false move, and we _will_ disintegrate you."

"But I didn't do anything to deserve—"

"Deserving's got nothing to do with this. We'll do it in a heartbeat, dude," Wendy said.

"You're a mean girl," the monster grumbled.

"Yeah, and I'll prove it if you give me a reason. So what's it gonna be?" she demanded.

"I'll be good," the monster promised.

"See that you do. 'Cause if you don't—I'll show you what a mean girl can _really_ do," Wendy said, her voice level and soft, and somehow worse than any bellowed threat.

Even though he was a monster, Mr. What's-His-Face shivered a little.


	8. Chapter 8

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14, 2016)**

* * *

8

OK, so the middle tunnel was wrong and ended in what was either a garbage dump or the Crawspace latrine. The Gnome and the Mystery Twins couldn't really bear to get close enough to be sure. So, coughing, more from the fumes in the tunnels than from the stink, Dipper, Mabel, and Winziger retraced their steps to the circular chamber, now hazed with vapors, and Mabel said, "The left-hand one! Gotta be it! We're looking for the passage that goes to the jail, so it's gotta be the sinister side."

"Keep low," Dipper said, stooping over. "Uh, Win, I don't think you need to duck like that—but Mabel and I have to try to keep our heads out of the worst of the smoke." His chest burned and his stinging eyes watered so much that he constantly had to wipe them and everything began to look foggy.

This time, however, the tunnel led on a definite downward slope—and the air grew a little better as it did. At one point, the beast, the creature, the Rumbelow, whatever, must have roared and thrashed up above because it shook the whole Crawlspace again, dislodging small rocks from walls and ceiling and making the explorers stagger to keep their balance.

Then they came to an enormous iron door, heavy and ancient-looking in the beam of Dipper's flashlight, black and pitted and splotched with a red acne of rust. A small grated window, about the size of Dipper's Journal, pierced the thick door about six and a half feet up.

"This is it," Winziger said. "This is Maul Chop Hindquarters."

"Headquarters," Dipper automatically corrected.

"Not in this case," Win said.

Dipper tried the door handle, more like a lever than a knob. It wouldn't budge. "Oh, great. Locked."

"This is a job for Mabel!" Mabel said. She located the keyhole—she had to stand on tiptoe to reach it—and removed from her sweater a thin, sharp nail file. "Here we go!"

Using skills imparted to her one rainy day four years before by Stanley Pines, she pressed one ear against the door, rolled her eyes upward, stuck her tongue out of her mouth, slipped the nail file into the keyhole, and promptly lost it.

They heard it jingle, faintly, on the far side floor. "Aw, rats!" Mabel said.

"Sis? Allow me." Dipper held up an old-fashioned key—the President's Key, in fact, that opened every lock in America made to a certain pattern before the year 1860 or thereabouts, not including combination locks, bolts, most modern padlocks, high-school lockers, and similar. So not _every_ lock, but a significant number, none the less. Though, come to that, it had not been designed for locks created by monsters, but those manufactured by humans. Still, worth a try.

And sure enough, the key snicked right into the keyhole, and Dipper turned it with very little effort and retrieved it. Mabel tried the handle, and it swiveled smoothly, as though kept oiled. "Well," she said with a chortle. "You did it! Look at you! After you, mon sewer."

Easier said than done. All three of them, including the little Gnome, had to lean their weight against the ponderous door to make it groan even a few inches on its hinges. They final shoved it open far enough to worm their way through the gap. But then Mabel insisted they had to wrench it a little further so she could retrieve her nail file, which was somewhere beneath it. They pulled and strained until she saw the file and said, "Got it! Should we close the door again?"

"No!" Dipper and Winziger yelled in unison. "We need a quick way out," Dipper explained. "In case we have to leave in a hurry."

"In fact," Winziger said, struggling as he wheeled over a rolling desk chair in which the Hulk would have looked undergrown, "let's wedge this in, just in case."

Which called for some more tugging, but now that it was open a foot and some inches, the door swung a little more easily on its hinges. They got the chair in place, and then, finally, had a chance to look around. "Where's this room?" Dipper asked.

Gnomes are notoriously literal-minded. "North-northwest of the marketplace and about half a human mile underground," Win said.

"No, I mean—well, what's it used for?"

It was a sizable chamber, about as big as the Museum in the Mystery Shack, but with a much taller ceiling, soaring thirty feet overhead and bristling with hundreds of small stalactites and speckled with a few hanging bats. A—desk? Maybe. A desk or _something_ blocky and big stood ten feet in from the door, taller than Dipper's head but suited to the enormous chair. It appeared to be hewn from stone.

Dipper chinned himself on the edge and found that he was looking at one of those desk nameplates, surprisingly mundane, though much larger than normal—a cherry-wood base like a pyramid that got delusions of grandeur and stretched itself sideways for about a yard, and bolted to that, a black metal plate, engraved in gold-colored runes.

He read it aloud, phonetically: "BIKWIDGE BIKFAHRT, KERSANZI KVZPA."

"Aie!" exclaimed Winziger, clapping his hands over his ears.

"I don't think I've ever actually heard anybody say 'Aie' before," Mabel said. "It's kind of cute. Read that again, Broseph!"

"No, speak not the Dark Tongue of Dethmekker!" begged Win.

"The what of the which now?" Mabel asked. "All those weird words, what's it mean? Sounds like Big Wig Big Fart something something."

"No, it's a name and a title," Win said. "Bikwidge Bikfahrt is one of the officers of the Maul Chops. The last two words mean, um, Deck Sergeant, approximately."

"Desk sergeant, you mean?" Dipper asked, dropping back to the floor.

"Deck," Win insisted. "A suspect comes in, Bikfahrt decks them. Beat first, ask questions when the suspect is unconscious, you know. He's a mean one."

Dipper had gone round behind the desk and had discovered it had oversized drawers that actually opened, though he tried only one, and inside it he glimpsed bloodstained implements. He closed it hurriedly and did not open another. He suspected that if he did, eventually he would find magazines with pictures of monsters in various stages of undress. He could remember what his Grunkle's office in the Shack had once held, from brass knuckles to back issues of _Fully Clothed Older Women_.

"Hey, I think here's the cells!" Mabel called from a dark corner. Something jangled. "And here's a great big honkin' keyring!"

"Don't go in there yet!" Dipper said, hurrying over. He paused and looked around. "Hey, wait. Stand where you are, and nobody move." He turned off the flashlight.

Someone, purportedly Groucho Marx, once remarked, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." The Maul Chops hindquarters was at least five shades darker than the darkest corner of the interior of a black Labrador. Dipper switched the light back on and discovered he had been holding his breath. "The overall glow doesn't work down here!"

"Well," Win said reasonably, "this part of the complex isn't a natural formation. It's monster-made. Excavated for the purpose of creating a high-security jail. Dethmekker miners worked on it—"

"Aw, kids?" Mabel asked.

Win hesitated, as if wondering whether he'd heard right, but then said, "Um, no, not minors with an O, miners with an E."

"Did you know they can't get served in the Skull Fracture in Gravity Falls?" Mabel asked. "Discrimination! Gol-dang it!"

Dipper rubbed his eyes, a gesture he'd picked up from Grunkle Ford. "Track, Sis, track. Win, who are the Dethmekkers? You mentioned their language before."

"Oh, them?" Win asked. "That's the race of monsters to which the Maul Chops belong. They're giants—well, you said you saw one. Technically, I guess they're not evil, but they're vile, bad-tempered, bloodthirsty, violent, rude, and unpleasant."

"Do they like poetry?" Mabel asked. "I bet they like poetry!"

"Not . . . that I know of," Win said. "I doubt it. They speak the horrible Dethmekker Tongue among themselves, but in the common language, they hardly ever say anything except, 'You done it, confess! We know you done it! What was it you done? You want me to hit you? Get up! You want me to hit you again? Get up! Why you no move no more?'"

"Poetry of a kind," Mabel insisted.

Win shook his head, which did not rattle. "Um. Back in an earlier Age of the World, it's said that the Dethmekkers served a great evil wizard who took the form of a gigantic burning red eye, but the small folk of the world somehow defeated the sorcerer and then his forces scattered and went underground, including the ancestors of the Maul Chops—"

"Did the wizard at least apologize for being evil?" Mabel asked. "I bet he did!"

"Not . . . that I heard of," Win said.

"Strange," Mabel mused. "I always heard it takes a big eye to admit he was wrong."

Win had to sit on the floor and put his head between his knees for a moment. Then he looked up. " _Anyway_ , the glow in the Crawlspace comes from some natural property of the stone there. I don't know what. But if you dig artificial passages into the rock, no glow, so here no light. There are wall sconces with torches, but I don't know how we'd light them, and they're probably burned out."

"Where you going, Broman?" Mabel called as Dipper stepped into the side tunnel.

"Just checking," came Dipper's voice, echoing slightly from the passageway. "You're right, Mabel. Nothing but cages in here. Cells, I guess. All open and empty, looks like." The faint light that spilled from the passage opening made the main office seem spookier, somehow.

"Help." It wasn't a loud cry, but a faint croak.

"Oops," Dipper said. "Correction: Somebody's back here. Or something. I'll check it out."

"Wait up, Brobro!" Mabel said. "Don't leave us in the dark!" She and Win hurried down the side tunnel. It was spacious in a different way—a much lower ceiling than the office, about fifteen feet wide and evidently about a hundred feet long, from the look of it. All along the left side, cages that looked as if they meant business stood with their great iron-barred doors swung ajar as if they had been hurriedly unlocked and thrown open. The place reeked.

I mean—well, imagine that you locked fifty cats up in a room with a litterbox that had no litter, but a small square of absorbent carpet, and left them to their own business for a week. Then without washing it, you took the carpet out and allowed a flock of fruit-eating parrots to throw up on it. And then you kept it damp for a month so a nice growth of rancid mold could take hold.

Well, that wouldn't even be close to the stench.

Anyway, they saw Dipper's flashlight halfway down the tunnel and hustled to catch up.

At the very last cage at the very end of the long passage, Dipper reached up, straining to put a key into the cell-door lock. It was too far above his head.

From inside the cell, a pitiful, faint, husky voice pled, "Please kill me."

"Nope," grunted Dipper. "Gonna get you out of here. Mabel, come stand on my shoulders and unlock this door."'

"You got it, Broseph!" She got behind him, and humming "Entry of the Gladiators" she scrambled up his back—oh, come on, you know that tune, it's the circus theme you hear played on a calliope when the clowns or acrobats come tumbling out, the march composed by Julius Fucik (and while you're minding your p's and q's, be very sure you mind that i, too)—the one that goes doot-doot-doodle doo da doot-doot-doodle, doot-doot-doodle doo da doot-doot-doodle, doot! Ta-da doot-doot, and so on. Please, I do the best I can. You'd know it if you heard it.

Anyhow, to the accompaniment of her own self-created cheerful soundtrack, Mabel balanced on Dipper's shoulders, fitted the key into the lock, and turned it. Then she hopped down. "There you go, mysterious prisoner!" she announced, opening the cell door. "You're free! You're saved from a terrible death!"

"Just my luck," mourned the wispy little man who came creeping out, blinking in the light. "Feh. I never catch a break."

Dipper considerately turned the light away from him, so it didn't shine directly in the eyes of the wasted figure. He was, quite possibly, human—but emaciated, clad in what Dipper really hoped were rags and not shreds of his own skin, stooped, bald, shaky, and ancient-looking. "There's a monster in the caverns," Dipper told him. "We're trying to find a way out. Can you help us?"

"Me?" the newcomer asked in his sandpaper voice. "I don't think so. I know from nothing about this place. See, I've been a prisoner right in this cell here for a thousand years, give or take a few decades."

"Are you a Gnome?" Mabel asked.

"No, no, I'm the cursed man," the old fellow said. "The one everyone in the world's heard about. Doomed to walk the Earth for all eternity, or until the end of time, whichever comes first. Surely you know my story?"

"Don't think so," Dipper said.

The aged creature sighed deeply. "Figures. I never have any luck." Again he sighed, doing a good job of it as if he'd had much practice. "Call me," he said, "the Wandering Dude."


	9. Chapter 9

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14, 2016)**

* * *

9

In any ordinary town, the trio might have attracted attention: Ford, in his adventuring garb of mulberry turtleneck, bandolier, and trench coat (concealing two pistol-like versions of the quantum destabilizer), plus, for this occasion, a backpack; then Wendy Corduroy, no longer dressed for work, but ready for action in her green plaid flannel shirt, worn jeans, mud-stained boots, and fur trapper's hat—the loose shirt covering her scabbard and the special axe passed down to her from an ancestor, since her hair was only shoulder-length and not yet long enough for concealment; and the bandy-legged Mr. What's-His-Face with his tiny little bowler hat, ridiculous coat, and shoes with spats.

You'd think someone would notice.

However, in Gravity Falls, Ford drove them downtown, parked, and got out of the car close to the intersection of Mystic (a narrow one-way street) and Main. If you looked really close at the doors on the right side of Mystic, close enough to read the numbers affixed to them, you might say, "Hey, wait a minute, something's screwy here."

Because the stores that faced Main Street left absolutely no room for anything these doors might open into. You wouldn't expect to walk through door number 13 on Mystic Street and wind up in the beauty parlor, but that's what would happen if the doors on Mystic were normal.

That's the kick. They were only paranormal. And they seemed badly numbered. The first one on that side of the street was 13, and the next down was 19, which was next to 21, followed by 34 and then 55. Small wonder the Post Office never sent a postal carrier down the street. The three paused at the doorway for a moment, and finally somebody else noticed them and reacted.

"Hello, Dr. Pines!" someone called mildly from across the street. "Fine morning!"

"Indeed, Mr. Strange!" Ford called as he waved.

Tad Strange went in number 1, Mystic Street, which was on the other side of the way. Next to, um, 1. Again. Which was next to 2, 3, 5, and 8.

"I definitely have to investigate this block," Ford muttered. "All right, Mr. What's-His-Face, you open the door. I'll go first, then you, and then Miss Corduroy. Do you want a pistol, Wendy?"

Wendy had drawn her axe and had plucked one of her red hairs. She split the hair on the edge of the axe as Mr. What's-His-Face looked on with fascination. "No, thanks," she said casually letting go of the slivered hair. "I'm good."

Ford told her, "I'm holding my destablilizer on our guide. Please open my backpack and take out three gas masks—oh, wait, I don't think one would fit our friend."

"I'll be OK," Mr. What's-His-Face said, his voice tense and twangy. "Just let me hyperventilate. Give me one minute of deep breathing and I can hold my breath for half an hour. But don't expect me to talk down there if the air's bad."

Ford said, "Go ahead."

Wendy watched as the demonic creature gulped air and swelled up, his arms and legs filling out. "You got like air sacs under your skin inside?" she asked curiously.

Mr. What's-His-Face nodded, or at least bobbed the part of him that must be his head, assuming he wore the derby on that part of him. Then he gave a thumbs up and unlocked the door.

Ford pulled on a gas mask—a sophisticated one, which looked a little like a skin-diving mask, but which had a ribbed filter and a metal tube of really compressed oxygen on each side. He said, "Wendy, if he gives you any trouble, you have my permission to use all necessary force." The mask made his voice sound hollow.

"I'll go with unnecessary force if I need to," Wendy said inside her own mask. "Go ahead, Dr. P. We'll see you at the bottom!"

Ford leaped. Mr. What's-His-Face held up a hand, counting off 5-4-3-2-1, and then leaped after him. Wendy perched right on the edge of the drop, pulled the door closed behind her, and counted off in her head before jumping.

It really was like being swallowed by an Apatosaurus, or so she presumed, never having had that experience. The walls were definitely made of pulsing, damp living flesh, and the fall felt as if it were one big long gulpy drop, anyhow.

She felt the air around her growing warmer, felt the flesh-like wall give way to a kind of smooth, curved ramp of stone, and then plumped down at the bottom, doing a three-point landing, heels and fist, other hand clutching her axe.

"I see why Mason admires you so," Ford said. "You stick a landing like a superhero." He and the alien creature stood there already, Ford with a high-powered lantern. The smoky air made the light a livid green, with creeping tendrils of a darker vapor swirling around their heads.

Mr. What's-His-Face tugged Ford's sleeve and eagerly pointed into the marketplace area, took two steps, and beckoned. ""Let's follow him," Ford said. "But be on the alert!"

Wendy's breathing sounded weird inside her mask, all Darth Vader-y, as she trotted along, clutching her axe. The demonic creature suddenly stopped. In front of him was a nook with a crudely lettered sign above it: FRAMES-R-UPS. "What is it?" Ford asked.

Mr. What's-His-Face pointed to the space, then pointed to himself. He drooped, shaking what you might think of as his head, since it had his big toothy mouth on it. "Sad?" Ford guessed. "You're sad . . . wait, was this your place?"

The maybe-a-head bobbed in agreement.

"Well, the spot was vacant, and someone took it over. That's business," Ford said. "Come. Let's find some trace of Mason and Mabel!"

He pulled out an anomaly detector and scanned. "Anything?" Wendy asked, trying to keep her voice calmer than she felt.

"Scores of traces . . . to be expected, since this is a paranormal space . . . wait, here's a fresher one, probably only a few hours long. Hm. Sort of a—yes, definitely a trail." He followed it, the alien and Wendy tagging along. It led to the Underground River Bank and to the vault, which stood open. The vault was obviously empty. Mr. What's-His-Face looked in and even started to enter, but Ford stopped him. "We're here for a rescue mission, not robbery," he said. "Wait, though, maybe—let's follow the track the _other_ way."

Once they caught sight of a distant, bubbling lava pit, sending out billows of fumes and glowing incandescent red and yellow spurts of molten rock. The heat got worse, but then the trail led away from the pit. "Odd," Ford said. "My detector reading was off the scale back there when I turned the sensor toward the crater. That's no ordinary volcano." He stumbled, and Wendy steadied him.

"Dr. P!" Wendy said. "Watch your step. We're heading down a slope."

Mr. What's-His-Face paused and looked scared. "What is it?" Ford asked him. "Mime!"

The creature imitated something hulking and huge and pretended to grab something smaller and to pound it. And then he mimed eating a donut.

"A cop!" Wendy said. "You're imitating a cop!"

The creature reached out, but she didn't cringe away as it put one gloved finger . . . on the tip of her nose.

"On the nosey!" Ford said. "Cops are this way?"

Again with the perhaps-a-head bob.

"Dudes, they may have captured Mabel and Dip!" Wendy said. "Come on!"

They came to a round chamber with three possible exits. Ford's tracker said that the creature they were trailing, whatever it was, had gone into the middle one, had come back out, and then had taken the left one.

"Be very careful," Ford said, taking out one of the pistols. He held it in his left hand, the lantern in his right. "The signal's stronger now. It's close. No telling what horrible thing this may be! Are you sure you don't want my spare destablilizer?"

"Got my axe, thanks," Wendy said. "Mr. What's—that's too long, I'm gonna just all you Face, OK? Face, are you really that scared?"

The creature bobbed again and lagged behind. The long tunnel trended downward and the surroundings got darker. "The ambient illumination is fading," Ford said. "That's interesting."

"Whoa!" Wendy said, coming to a halt. Ahead a heavy iron door stood jammed open—by an oversized office chair. "What the heck?"

"At least the air is cleaner here," Ford said. "The vapors are lighter than air, and we've gone about fifty feet further downwards as we walked along along the tunnel." He pulled off his gas mask and took a deep breath. "Stuffy, but bearable."

Wendy took off her own mask. Her face felt damp from perspiration, and she strands of her red hair clung to her face. Next to her, Mr. What's-His-Face took a deep gulp of air. "They stole my space!" he complained as soon as he had breathed. "The crooks! I had my shop in that sweet spot for years, and the rotten Squealers went and stole it! I have a 999-year lease, too!"

"If we get my niece and nephew back," Ford said, "I'll try to make it up to you by sending you home. Now, if the creature that we've been tracking—its vibrational signature is odd, but I think it may be Gnomish—can help us, we may be getting somewhere. Let's go in very quietly."

They clambered over the huge swivel chair and found themselves in the cavernous Maul Chop Hindquarters. And then Wendy whispered, "Dudes! Look over there in the corner! There's light down that way!"

* * *

Inside the appallingly stinky corridor of jail cells, Dipper, Mabel, and Win were desperately urging the Wandering Dude to leave with them. He kept smiling and saying, "I don't want to be a bother. Please, don't mind me. Just give me a drink of water and a little bite of food, I'll be fine."

"No you won't!" Dipper said. "You don't understand. Something terrible is happening to the Crawlspace!"

"Come on," Mabel coaxed. "We'll get you something to drink and I think I may have a gummy koala somewhere for you!"

Win settled for putting his shoulder against the ancient fellow's butt and shoving, forcing him to take one tottery step after another, and they slowly made their way back to the entrance to the cells—

And then Dipper said, "Hold it! I see a light ahead!"

"Chops! We're in trouble now!" said Winziger.


	10. Chapter 10

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14, 2016)**

* * *

10

While Mr. What's-His-Face hung back and guarded the rear, Wendy with her axe drawn and Ford with his pistol pulled charged into the cell block, yelling "Yaaarrrghh!"*

Dipper and Winziger had scrambled up to the outside top bars of the cells, and as what they imagined to be foes stormed in, they launched themselves at the invaders, Dipper yelling "Yaaarrghh!" and Winziger "Audit!"**

At the same instant, Mabel fired her grappling hook, which lodged on an overhead crossbeam, and swung toward the attackers, feet out for a devastating double kick as she yelled "Grappling hook!"***

At the remote end of the corridor, the Wandering Dude held up his hand and wiggled his fingers in mild greeting, saying, ""Welcome, friends!"

After a moment, Dipper became aware that he had landed on, and was actually wrestling with, Wendy. "Wait, what!"

"Dude!" Now, Wendy probably would not squee under most circumstances, but her happy shout had definite squee-like overtones.

Winziger sat astride Ford's shoulders, uselessly pummeling his head with weak open-hand slaps. "Take this with interest!"

Ford plucked him off and held him dangling by the scruff of his neck. The only light came from the diffused glow of Dipper's flashlight, which he had dropped in his plunge and which lay on the floor, still illuminated. In that miserable dim gleam, Winziger, in his pinstriped suit, swung like a pendulum as Ford held his glasses with his free hand and examined his captive. In an interested tone, he murmured, "My word!"

And just then Mabel swung right into her great-uncle's midriff— _oof!—_ immediately converting her attack into a Mabel hug. "Grunkle Ford! Yay!"****

It took a few seconds for things to settle down. Ford turned on his lantern again, Dipper said, "Uh—you can put me down," but for just a bit longer, Wendy cradled him like a baby and kissed him, as Winziger asked Ford, "Zo, are you satisfied vith your currrrent financial inztitution?" while Ford hugged Mabel again and said, "I'm so glad we found you!"

The Wandering Dude coughed. "This is so heart-warming. Now, I don't want to be any trouble, but if I might ask if anybody has just a sip of water—"

And behind them the door to the cell block clanged and the lock clicked.

" _Face!_ " Wendy yelled, dropping Dipper and speeding to the now-locked door. She rattled it furiously. "Oh, you are _so_ axe meat!"

"I just can't trust you, sorry!" said Mr. What's-His-Face through the barred hatchway. "Good luck, though. No hard feelings? I do hope you get out before the whole place comes down!"

"You treacherous demon!" Ford yelled. "And I was going to find you a way back home!"

"Hey, is that the guy who stole my face?" Mabel ran to the door and shouted, "You come right back here, Mister! You open this door right this second!"

Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, Mr. What's-His-Face would have ignored her, gone his way, and left them behind. In every possible version of that probable scenario, he would have hurried back up the tunnel in darkness, got lost in the round chamber, taken two wrong turns, wandered for too long, and would have at last reached the main level just in time to be vaporized in the explosion and fire.

And when after three months the monsters came back to their old marketplace to rebuild, and the Maul Chops returned to the devastated Crawlspace and unlocked the iron door leading to the cell block, they would have been greeted by the pitiful corpses of four humans and a Gnome, dead of starvation or asphyxiation. And the Wandering Dude would have said, "Oh, good, you're back. If it wouldn't be a lot of trouble, could I have a little water, please?"

Pretty bleak.

However, this was the one-in-a-thousandth time, and the demon unlocked the door again. "Sorry, sorry! Sorry!"

Behind him a voice like a landslide on a rocky hill rasped, "Somebody broke in! Catch him!"

For a few Maul Chops had evidently remained, and like Dipper and Wendy, they came to the Hindquarters to shelter from the deadly vapors.

And they were not happy to discover they had visitors.

* * *

Bikwidge Bikfahrt was, as Maul Chop officers go, one of the best. True, he screamed at his men, kicked their arses, demoted them on the least provocation, and held the view that any suspicious captive—and they were _all_ suspicious, because why else would they have been arrested?—should be beaten into submission even though they had already submitted, because if they didn't take their licks, they were depriving the Maul Chops of their chance to make an honest living, and anyway, the beating into submission is always efficient because it usually means that the prisoner will never testify to anything ever again, which saves time and paper.

Still, Bikwidge's men said, he was tough, but fair. He remembered all their names and birthdays, and every Scatterday***** they would find little presents from him in their lockers, nothing gaudy, but small, thoughtful things like blackjacks, brass knuckles, and occasionally a stick of sweet candy. You _had_ to admire a leader like that, they said— _or else_.

But as he kicked aside the rolling chair—who the hells would jam HIS personal chair in the door, where it might get scratched—and slammed open the heavy iron door with a boom, two of his least-worst Chops at his back, Bikwidge was, quite frankly, flummoxed.

Oh, he'd heard about jailbreaks often enough. But they'd always gone in the wrong direction before— _out_ , not _in_. If that little whatever-it-was, the creature that no beating could kill, no amount of asphyxiation exterminate, no water could drown, no fire could burn, had broken out of his nice cell, the one at the end in the prime location, where the open channel that served as a general sewer for all the prisoners flowed out into a small arched drain conveniently close to the barred door of his cell, where the bed was sandstone—sandstone! The softest rock in the joint—if the Wandering Dude had been so impolite as to break out of _his_ jail, then Bikwidge was going to not-kill him so much that it would hurt real bad!

But then—a ragtag force of what-the-hells, _humans?_ , plus a Gnome and one of the Crawlspace merchants, what's-his-name, came screaming at him and his men.

"Get them!" Bikwidge yelled.

Horker Glurgle, a faithful old Chop, only a day from retirement, hurled himself at the intruders, bellowing the order "Show me your hands!" only to be hit by a blast from a, what?, magic wand, Bikwidge assumed. It was only a flesh wound, but then again, it was a foot in diameter and all the way through poor old Horker, who shouted "Ghhhgtggggg!" and fell.******

And then something with fire-red hair lashing around its head came swinging something at him—at _him!_ The big cheese, the head Chop, the Kersanzi Kuzpa, to be assaulted with a _stick!_ Growling, he reached out to catch it.

And stared at the stump where his hand used to be.

The attacking creature had climbed up him—it stood with one hand grasping his tie, both feet braced on the upper swell of his belly, and it spun the stick, no, the _axe,_ in its hand and said, "Next one splits your head!"

Phrappf Zdinkbatt, the third Maul Chop, ran past. Something sat astride his shoulders, pounding his head with what looked like a rock. Phrappf's battle cry at that moment was "Gedditoffme, gedditoffme, gedditoffme!" He went down as another small creature fired a rope that caught his ankles and tripped him.

"Give it up, man!" yelled an insignificantly small human male from the floor. "Or my girlfriend will split your skull."

His fury past the critical point, Bikwidge thundered, "YOU PUNY—Wait, what? GIRLfriend?"

The red-haired creature clinging to him head-butted him.

* * *

The Kersanzi Kuzpa next came to his senses lying on the stone floor of a cell. He bellowed and surged up, reaching to seize the bars but forgetting that missing hand—which would take at least three months to regenerate—and screamed, "You will pay for this!"

"At reasonable monthly rates," said a sarcastic, thin voice with a bankerly chuckle.

Bikwidge glared and then his jaw dropped open. "Mister Kobold?"

The banker glared right back. "Call me MISTER Kobold!"

"Uh—I thought I did."

"Whoo, that was a close one," gasped a husky voice. "And me about to retire and all."

Bikwidge looked around. Old Horker sat propped up against the stone wall, Phrappf tending to him. The old Chop had a bandage the size of a living-room curtain wrapped tight around his chest. "You had a hole clean through you! How did you even survive?" his chief boomed.

Horker saluted and smiled apologetically. "I was in a bad way, sir. But that little fellow yonder, him what's always lived in the last cell, he donated me a bit of blood that the gentlemen wearing the specs over his eyes injected into me with a little needly thing, and that seems to have done the trick."

"I'm sorry, but it only works once for anyone with a mortal wound," apologized the Wandering Dude. "And the next time, well, you can only not-die once, I'm afraid. Unless you're me," he added sadly.

"Are you ready to listen to reason?" asked a steady, reasonable male voice. It was the human—HUMAN! In the Crawlspace! The humiliation!—the human wearing the specs who had shot old Horker. Uh, and then evidently somehow saved the old fellow's life with some kind of sticky needly thing and some weird blood. All of this ran through Bikwidge's head, where it had lots of empty space for running.

"Oh, you are so dead!" yelled Bikwidge, furious at the human for the damage it had caused and then for making him _think_. "I—I am gonna—gonna tear you to little pieces! And burn those pieces! And grind up the ashes left after burning those pieces! And, and, and then glue them back together! And then HURT THEM!"

"Shut it!" The girlfriend's voice hit like a hard slap across his brain. "Listen, dumbass, we're all in this together! You want to live, you cooperate with us, get it? Say yes!"

"Yes!" Bikwidge blurted, his mouth having made the decision before his brain engaged.

"Now," the man with the magic wand said, "you don't like humans in the Crawlspace—"

"It is FORBIDDEN!" Bikwidge roared. It felt comforting to go from agreeing back to yelling. Yelling he understood. Agreeing was new to him. "Only monsters and freaks permitted in the Crawlspace! The Lore is plain!"

"Hello?" The man waved a hand at him. "Look. Count them. Six fingers, see? I _am_ a freak. Are we clear?"

Bikwidge blinked. It is said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.******* Fuddy-duddies say it's also the mark of cognitive dissonance, but whatever, man. Whether Bikwidge possessed a first-rate intelligence or not, he had enough of whatever-rate intelligence he owned to see that, yes, the human's strange hands marked him as freakish, though equally humanish. "Well," he rumbled. " _You_ , maybe."

The redhead came right up to the cell bars, making Bikwidge flinch back. She smiled, making him gulp. "Dude, I chopped your hand off. Am I a monster, or what?"

"Uh—well—technically, I guess, some would say that," the officer muttered.

"And I am gonna marry her!" the smaller male human said. "She's a flippin' Corduroy, man, and she'll be my wife! That makes me a monster-by-marriage, right?"

That was a difficult one. Bikwidge mumbled, "I, I'd have to look it up in the Books of Lore." But he was the Kersanzi Kuzpa and he did know at least some of the major points of the Lore. One of the fundamentals was that the Hurukh-H'ai were matrilineal, which did indeed mean that a married male was considered to fall within the bride's species (not necessarily gender, though a shared gender was also possible because in some ways the Hurukh-H'ai were tolerant).

And anyway, anyone of any conceivable gender who would marry this fiery-haired creature—"All right, maybe you, too, technically," he grudgingly muttered. "But the one swinging around in the air—"

"I," Mabel Pines said as she swung past, "am adorable!"

" _Monstrously_ adorable," Ford said with the suggestion of a smile.

"Very well, very well!" Bikwidge said. He was beginning to feel like he had been comfortably perched on a very solid tree branch, enjoying the warm day and the view, but had just noticed the arboreal beaver cheerfully gnawing away at his limb, close to the trunk. "For the time being—truce? Is that a word?" He opened and closed his mouth as if tasting something unfamiliar. "I've never said it before, it sounds funny—"

Mister Kobold stepped up to the cell. "I've drawn up an agreement of truce," he said in an officious tone, without his normal accent, holding up an arrest form, the blank back side heavily overwritten in a clear banker's handwriting. "It says that you recognize our right to exist, that from this time forward Dr. Pines—he's the man who shot your underling and then cured his wound—may visit the Crawlspace freely as long as he abides by the Lore, and that all of you and we will cooperate either in an effort to destroy the monster that is currently threatening the Crawlspace or, failing that, in an effort to find some way of escaping with our lives. Until these efforts are concluded, every one of us, your party and ours, will be accepted as honorary monster or freak, whichever is appropriate. I need your thumbprint—no, other arm, no hand on that one—right here, and here, and here, and pinky print on this page, this one, this one, right, and it's all legal. So—do we have a truce, Kersanzi Kuzpa Bikfahrt?"

The officer sighed. In a weird way, he felt relieved to finally give in to something more powerful. And yes, he and his two men had been terrified that the Hindquarters, their absolute last resort and place of retreat, would not save their lives. And these creatures had come not only with Fear and Panic, but also with a tiny thing called Hope.

So, very nearly humbly, he said, "Truce, Mr. Mister Kobold."

* * *

*"Yaaaarrghh" is the oldest battle cry in continuous use. This is because unlike other battle cries, such as "Charge!" "Banzai!" "EE-Yeehaw!" "Ei! Ei!" and so on, it serves two situations equally well. If you yell "yaarrghh" and win, it gave you the courage and fighting spirit you needed going into the fight. If on the other hand you lose, it's an excellent death rattle.

**To someone in banking, "Audit" serves both as a war cry and also as a curse.

***"Grappling hook" is not technically a battle cry, but under stress, Mabel tended to go with what she knew.

****You know how in the old books they say, "It happened in less time than it takes to tell?" They knew what they were talking about. But telling it this way makes somewhat more sense than the actual impression, which was closer to this: "Yaarrghh! Swoop! Wendy! Dude! My word! Oof!"

*****Scatterday was not the name of a weekday, but an annual holiday celebrated by the Hurukh-H'ai (that was the species to which the Maul Chops belonged; in the old Dark Tongue, the name meant, "Uh-oh, look out!") to commemorate the occasion when their ancient powerful, evil creator and leader had crashed to earth in the ruin of his empire because a little runty guy had brought him a ring or something, and on that day all of their ancestors had _scattered_. The legends were very confused, but the brightest of the Hurukh-H'ai sometimes told their children as they tucked them in, "And He Who Ruled was thrilled because his suitor had been to Jared's."

******Not technically a battle cry, _Ghhhgtggggg_ means roughly, "I give up."

*******F. Scott Fitzgerald, _The Crack-Up._ Sad and intense, but worth a read. Dang, I've just noticed that my monthly asterisk bill has tripled.


	11. Chapter 11

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14, 2016)**

* * *

11

"But I came back!" Mr. What's-His-Face wheedled.

"That," said Ford sternly, "is beside the point! You were ready to abandon us just to save your own integument! How could you expect me ever to trust you again? Besides, you returned only because you were being chased by three guards."

"But I helped in the fight," the faceless monster said.

Ford snorted. "Ha! You were running away from the officials! You just happened to run in our direction! I ought to just cut you loose and let you take your chances!"

Bikvidge, kneeling on the floor, looked up and said, "Mr. What's-His-Face was a respected merchant of the Crawlspace before he mysteriously disappeared four falls ago. Alone, he cannot survive what is above. He must have help to live. We all must. I will speak on his behalf."

"Well . . .will you help make sure he doesn't desert us again?" Ford asked.

"I give my word."

Ford looked dubious. "Well . . . all right, Mr. Face, under those conditions, you can come along with us. But I don't see why I should keep my end of the bargain and try to return you home if we survive this. You did nothing to help us!"

Mr. What's-His-Face pointed to the slight, ragged figure that stood beside him. "I did! I protected the Wandering Dude from harm."

"I miss water," the Wandering Dude murmured nostalgically.

Wendy, sitting next to Dipper on the Hindquarters floor, said to the wizened old man, "Sorry, man, I brought about everything other than a canteen. I'm thirsty, too."

"Me, too," Dipper said. "And I'm getting hungry." He raised his voice and called to Bikvidge: "Kerskup,* sir? Is there any water?"

Bikvidge had been examining his wounded man, Horker, who said he thought his spine had knitted and that he might be able to walk, if he had a staff to lean on. "You take it easy for a while," the officer said testily.

"Kerskup," said Horker, "I agree with the Dude and the human kid, sir. I could really use a drink. Maybe I could go as far as the Hollow Well and fetch us back some water."

"No!" yelled Bikvidge. Not that he was angry, but he just made it a policy to yell at his men in general. "You're not well enough!"

"Sir?" asked Phrappf, "Permission to laugh?"

"Denied!" Then, in a somewhat less furious tone, Bikvidge screamed, "Laugh at _what,_ _nank'lbait'r_?"

Wincing from having been called, essentially, a snot-nosed kid, Phrappf asked tentatively, "Your pun? Uh, he's not _well_ enough to go to the _well_?"

"That was _not_ a pun!" Bikvidge exploded. "Look, I will _tell_ you when I make a joke and I will give you a direct order to laugh! _Got that_?"

"Got it!"

"Good!"

Wendy pushed herself up to her feet, using her axe like a cane. "Yo, Dr. P.! These guys say there's water somewhere not far. Let me and Dipper go bring some back? We're all gonna need it!"

"Is the Hollow Well far?" Dipper asked Bikvidge.

"Not far. Down the _shtipshish_ tunnel to the end."

"Man," Mabel said, "Why do all your words got to sound like something nasty?"

"They are what they are," Bikvidge said. "Who'll go with these two as guide?"

"If I may have a drink of water," said the Wandering Dude, "I will gladly lead them."

"You know the way?" Bikvidge asked him in an amazingly soft and kindly voice. The Maul Chop chief had got over his initial anger after learning that the Wandering Dude had not, after all, engineered his own escape, and truth to tell, the big guy always felt rather friendly toward the elderly creature. It was true, too that the Dude had not ever been charged with anything, but merely held on suspicion of possibly being suspicious. The ancient fellow had been the Maul Chops' guest in the cells for as long as Bikvidge had been alive and even longer, and many years ago he had told the infant Bikvidge bedtime stories, and all in all, the Stockholm Syndrome works in both directions.

"Oh, sure, yes, I do," the Dude replied. "Up the tunnel forty Chop strides, behind the fallen boulder, and then down the steep way to the Well."

"Very _well_ ," Bikvidge said. He glared at his men. "Laugh, you maggots!"

Horker almost hurt himself again laughing, and Pfrappf rolled on the floor, which was a mistake because it had not really been mopped in, well, in this geologic age.

"Water pail's in the bottom right drawer of my desk," Bikvidge said. "My men steal everything I don't hide, the _sodd'n bistards."_ **

"Let's go, Dip!" Wendy said.

* * *

The water pail turned out to be an ingeniously constructed collapsible container. Full of water, it would stand under its own weight. Empty, it flattened and partly rolled up. It seemed to be made of a tough but lightweight leather, though from what animal skin it probably was better not to ask.

"This way," the Dude said, leading them out of the Chop office and a short way up the tunnel. "If it hasn't collapsed, it should be right over here, um, no, over there. See the little opening behind the boulder?"

"Tight squeeze for a Chop," Wendy observed.

"They generally send the children to get water," the Dude said. "That way it doesn't matter."

"What doesn't matter?" Dipper asked.

"That some of them never make it back alive," the Dude said. "They're just children. Not much use in policing the Crawlspace."

"That's not nice!" Wendy growled.

"No," agreed the Dude. "But it is practical."

The crack behind the boulder was larger than it had first appeared in the beam of Dipper's flashlight. They all made it in with no trouble, and then they walked some way through a narrow tunnel—more like a wide fissure—that led steeply downward. At the far end, they saw a dry-laid wall of rock nearly as tall as Wendy—she could just look over it—and the Dude said, "There it is. If the water hasn't been spoiled by all the shaking and smoke and so on."

They saw a bucket, made of dark wood bound with iron, hanging from a windlass, but it was too high for them. In the end, the Dude held the flashlight while Dipper made a stirrup of his hands to raise Wendy up, and she pulled a lever that released a pawl that allowed the windlass to turn that allowed the dipping bucket to drop down maybe a hundred feet on a long rope.

They heard an echoing splash, and Wendy said, "There's water down there, anyhow. You tired, Dip?"

"I'm braced," Dipper said. "It's OK. Pull it back up."

Wendy cranked the windlass, the pawl clacked in the teeth of a gear, and after what seemed like a long time, the bucket came dripping up as high as the lip of the wall. She snagged the pail by holding her axe out and hooking the head over the rope. Then she tugged and unwound until she could reach the bucket and haul it in.

"Better let me taste it first," the Wandering Dude said. "If it's poison, I'll know, but it won't kill me." He held out his cupped palms, and Wendy tipped them full of water. The old man sucked up the (roughly) half-cup of water and stood as though savoring the taste, a bit like a highly cultured oenophile.*** "Not poison," he said with a nod.

So they emptied the draw bucket into the portable one, drew one more for good measure, and then set off back up the steep tunnel, Dipper and Wendy hauling the drinking pail between them, sharing the load. "Jack and Jill," Wendy said.

"Yeah, well, let's not fall down and break our crowns," Dipper said.

"Oh, I didn't know you were royals," said the Dude, just ahead of them in the narrow tunnel. "I'm sorry for not showing you proper obeisance, your majesties."

"Man, we'll never be royals," Wendy said with a chuckle.

"No," Dipper agreed. "We have a different kind of buzz."

"Your words are strange," the Dude said. "But anyway, thanks for the water."

* * *

Everyone in the Hindquarters drank, and Bikvidge found four Chop canteens, each holding nearly a half-gallon, to pack more water for the ordeal to come. "Are we ready?" Ford asked.

"What are we doing, now?" Dipper asked.

"We're going up to the main level. I have two gas masks and one spare for you, Mabel, and Mr. Kobold. I'm sorry I don't have more for the Hurukh-Ha'i, but they say they can tolerate the gases for a short time, Mr. What's-His-Face can survive for a while without one, and the Wandering, erm, Dude says he doesn't need one. If the heat permits, those of us with some protection or immunity from poisonous air will try to approach the Rumbelow, which apparently has claimed Sadist Square as its own territory. I will attempt to destroy the creature with my destabilizer pistol."

"I love it when a plan comes together!" Mabel said.

Ford raised his hand and continued: "But should the heat or the poisonous vapors be too intense, we'll try for two emergency escape routes that Mr. Bikvidge knows about. They lead to the surface, the preferable one—as far as I can tell—in the woods not too far from the Shack, the other, more difficult one to the fumarole field a few miles from Ghost Falls. It has the appearance of an extinct lava tube, but the Kersanzi Kuzpa says it was intended for the evacuation of the smaller monster species in case of emergency."

"Wait, _smaller_?" Mabel asked. "What about Bikvidge and his men? Will they be able to use it too?"

"Mr. What's-His-Face might just squeeze through. We," Bikvidge said firmly, "will not fit. It is no matter. We are Hurukh-H'ai! We will remain behind and fight to the end."

"No!" Mabel said, reaching high to grab hold of his remaining hand. "The Mystery Twins never leave a man behind!"

The huge creature stared at her for a moment, his one eye round with surprise. Then, astonishing everyone, the Chop officer impulsively knelt and gathered Mabel against him in a tight embrace. "O Daughter of Men," he said in an unusually thick voice, " _t'a pompu z'seze moxina ke t'a tinkter_!"****

His two soldiers, the nervous Pfrappf and the wounded Horker, snapped to attention and saluted Mabel—their salute was making a fist and pounding it against their foreheads—and then both exclaimed, "Well said, Sarge!"

Mabel patted the huge shoulder as the monstrous, sniffling Chop officer let go of her. "Yeah, uh, thanks, but you and your men got a job to do and we do, too, and we're all in the same boat together, and nobody stays behind, so, uh, shape up and ship out," Mabel said, thinking that after she got home she'd need three baths in boiling water to get Bikvidge's smell off. She stuck a defiant fist in the air. "Come on, everybody! We're off on the adventure of a lifetime!"

" _Another_ one?" asked the Wandering Dude in a despondent tone.

* * *

* _Kerskup_ , a shortening of _Kersanzi Kuzpa,_ is the Dark Tongue's rough equivalent of "Sarge." Dipper didn't know that, but he had picked up the term from hearing Horker and Phrappf use it.

** _Sodd'n_ =crew, _bistard_ =enterprising. A term of approval in the Dark Tongue. The sound of _s_ on the end of the adjective makes the phrase approximate the meaning "Crew of clever thieves."

***No, _oenophile_ is a real word. It means a drunk with lots of money.

****Bikvidge was married and he and his wife had one daughter, younger than Mabel in Hurukh-H'ai terms. He hoped they both had escaped in the evacuation, but was unsure whether they had survived or not. He was tough, even brutal, but a dad is a dad, and at that moment he badly needed to embrace _somebody's_ daughter, because he was about ninety per cent sure that whatever happened to the rest, he and his men were doomed and he would never see his own child again. That is why he said very tenderly to Mabel, "Your heart is much larger than your brain."


	12. Chapter 12

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14, 2016)**

* * *

12

For some reason the Wandering Dude remained interested in the question of royalty. Even after Wendy explained that she and Dipper had just been referencing a popular song, he kept wondering about kings and things (possibly cabbages and boiling-hot seas, but on most subjects, he was a man [if in fact he was a man] of few words). "Who is king of the human realm now?" he asked.

Dipper said, "There's not really one of all humans."

"Oh, I remember that now," the Dude said. "But I really meant the king of, you know, these, what's the word, colonies?"

"Who was it last you remember, Dude?" Wendy asked.

"George the . . . Third? Yes, I think so. George the Third. I was newly arrived in the colony of Pennsylvania when George the Third was king. And almost at once, I was captured by a tribe of natives. They played with me for about a year until killing me and seeing me not die got old for them, and they traded me to others further west, and so on, until I came here to the trackless wilderness and the natives here shut me up in a cave because they heard that two white men and a native woman were approaching and they thought that having me as a captive would be bad public relations. And then I got thrown into the Maul Chop jail. Boring, I'm afraid. Not much of a biography."

"Well, we don't have a king at all anymore," Dipper said. "And nobody around here is royalty."

Mildly, as though still trying to understand, the Dude said, "But you said you had crowns."

"That was just a reference to a nursery rhyme," Dipper said. "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack came down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after."

After a moment's thought, the Dude murmured, "Not much of a nursery rhyme, either. I don't mean to insult your poets, but _After_ and _water_ don't rhyme, do they?"

"Well, no, but most little kids don't notice," Dipper said.

The Dude seemed lost in memory. "Take the Garudians, they had great nursery rhymes," he said in a musing, far-away voice. "They were a group who lived in a corner of Mesopotamia many months ago. Is months the right word? I think I mean millennia. Anyway, the Garudians thought I was a demigod, I believe. I was raised in that country, though I think I was adopted. They told me my real parents came from the sky and then returned there. Anyway, after I got old and stopped aging and still didn't die, sometimes I tended my friends' children, and later children's children, children's children's, et cetera. Oh, the sweet Garuidan songs I'd sing to them. Best nursery songs ever. Heh! I remember one: " _Arghaz d' khafhaldi tswop, k'a kushtan ek va dop, s'toi dop s'ka ut, k'a kushtan vut! Akkkle d'aggle duwop!_ There's a nursery rhyme for you."

"It does have a nice melody," Dipper said. He tried to memorize the notes. It was very pleasant, and he might be able to set his own words to the tune—if he ever got out of there.

"What does it mean in real language?" Mabel asked, her voice muffled by her gas mask.

The dude asked, "Um, in English? Let me see." He considered it for a few minutes and then said, "I can't make it rhyme, but roughly, 'Look you little jerk, I've had it with your yowling. I'm putting you in bed, so go to sleep or I'll let this mean old man babysit you again.'"* He coughed. "I had a sort of minor role in that one," he admitted. "And I'm not really mean."

They had been plodding along upwards through the dark tunnel, the air growing denser, smellier, and warmer. As they entered the main cavern of the Crawlspace, Bikwidge, his eye watering, said, "The exit to the world above by the small magic huts—"

"The outhouses," Ford said.

"—whatever they are, the paired wood huts, is not far. Let us examine it to see if the way may be cleared."

"That makes sense," Ford said.

"Aw, no monsters?" Mabel asked. "I want to kill a monster! Pew! Pew-pew!"

"Later, Sis," Dipper said, trying to hold everything together.

They had to clamber over low piles of fallen rubble where a few stalactites had landed and smashed, but then they came to an almost-blocked niche. Fallen stone rose up high over even Bikwidge's head, though it looked as if a small cavity still lay inside, behind the rockfall. "We should reconnoiter," Ford said.

"I'm on it," Win told him. The gas mask barely fit his face—well, it was too large, not too small, so maybe "barely" is wrong there—but at least he wasn't choking. He studied the rocks, then scaled them very easily. At the top, he poked his head forward into the little cavity, then returned. "OK," he said. "The teleportation cabinet looks mostly undamaged. The rocks just block the way in, that's all. If they can be cleared out, then the cabinets might be functional or at least repairable."

Bikwidge said, "My men can clear the stones. We are strong. We can breathe here, though it hurts. Closer to the monster, the air will be fouler and I fear we will weaken and be of no great use. _T'a-khazakh**_ Ford, will you trust us to clear this rock pile?"

Ford said, "By the Pythagorean Theorem, I trust you, Kersanzi Kuzpa Bikwidge."

He made it sound like the most solemn oath of truthfulness he knew, and all three of the Chops straightened and gave him their traditional salute, though Bikwidge had to use the wrong fist, the other being temporarily missing for the next few months.

Winziger said, "Maybe I should stay here, too. I can climb up the pile as we work and see if any stones may fall the wrong way and damage the hut. My mask is about eight per cent too loose, and I don't think I could do much against a monster."

Visibly impressed, Bikwidge said, "Mr. Mister Kobold, I praise your wit and name you Deputy in the Maul Chops. Honorary, no pay."

"He couldn't do much about a monster because he's little," the Wandering Dude helpfully put in. "But I'll go with you, Stanford Pines. Maybe I can at least distract the monster while you kill it. It can't do anything to me. Well, it can, but nothing permanent."

Ford pondered for a second. "Mr. What's-His-Name should remain here, too. He can't be too active while holding his breath. Let him observe and offer what help he can, and I'll make this request of you: If you clear the teleportation booth, and it works, let him go first." He turned to Mr. What's-His-Face, whose posture showed his surprise, and said, "Good luck. If you make it through, leave the surface booth, go straight ahead to the track—you'll see it—and turn right. That will take you to the Mystery Shack, where you've been before. Tell Soos, the man who runs it, that I said you're to be treated as a guest until I return. If I don't return—then good luck again. But remember—no human faces!"

Lacking the ability to speak down there, the monstrous Mr. What's-His-Face knelt on one knee and took off his little derby.

"He's saying thank you," Win explained.

"He's welcome. If he makes it out, the rest of you go to the surface, too. Winziger, you follow the directions to the Mystery Shack. Ask to speak with my brother, Stanley. He's used to unusual, um, people, and he'll help you all find a safe place to stay. If the teleporters won't work, and if the rest of us can't kill the monster, we'll try the other escape routes. I hope to see you all again," Ford told them. "Come on, gang."

As soon as Ford had left, Horker moved awkwardly, because of his bandage, and painfully rolled one smaller stone aside from the base of the fall. Phrappf coughed and said to Bikwidge, "Excuse me, chief, but are you intending to betray the humans and clear the way, then kill them or capture them?"

Bikwidge slapped his subordinate hard. "They are honorary monsters now!" he snarled. "No trickery! If I die here, you will be in charge, and I order you to treat them well, understand?"

Phrappf saluted. "Yes, sir. Only if you'd planned to double-cross them, I was gonna smash your head with one of these rocks. See, I, well, I like the little loud one who swings from the rope."

"So do I. Get to work, maggot! Oh, and Phrappf—good on you. There's more to you than I thought, and when Horker retires, I'm thinking of promoting you. If we both live."

"Thanks, boss," Phrappf said, and he climbed the rubble and rolled down the largest of the blocking boulders, being careful not to crush anybody below. Horker couldn't do much with anything heavy, but he, Mr. What's-His-Face, and Win straining all together could just about roll the medium-and-smaller boulders out of the way. Even one-handed, Bikwidge could move the larger ones, once Phrappf displaced them.

They all understood it was going to take a long time—and even then the wood hut might be badly smashed up and not functioning. But the hard labor was something to do. Choking and coughing, they fell into a rhythm and began to sing an old Maul Chops work song:

* * *

 _K'hai zhun barshin ko zha kalkon,_

 _H'ai! H'ai, Sit'H'ai!_

 _Mishk vahlukina ka't'alkon!_

 _Tai! Tai! M'Tai!***_

* * *

The heat was infernal, the air bad, the work back-breaking. Still, the Maul Chops thought this was light duty, and the companionship was almost unprecedented, and despite everything, they all, even Mr. What's-His-Name, grinned and thought, _damn, bad as this is, it makes me feel good!_

Little by little they started to expose the teleportation booth, which was banged up, but which, with a little—well, a helluva lot, really—of luck would be their ticket to living.

* * *

*You think that's bad? We have rhymes about women cutting off the tails of handicapped mice! About a major bridge collapsing! About a man who imprisoned his wife in a rotting pumpkin shell! Sheesh! Like we have room to complain!

 _**T'a-khazakh_ literally means "he who flogs me." To the Hurukh-h'ai it is a term of respect that one soldier applies to another of higher rank.

***Though the real tune is utterly different, you _could_ sing this to "I've Been Working on the Railroad."**** As to its meaning, well as Robert Frost remarked, "Poetry always evaporates in translation." So it's extremely unlikely I can convey the cheerful, dedicated, bold spirit of a Hurukh-H'ai work song, but without trying to write it in meter or rhyme, I'll have a go:

"Here we are struggling to do something impossible a crazy boss told us to do,

Look out! Look out! Look out for us!

Instead let's stuff his stupid head up the wrong end of his alimentary canal!

Yes! Yes! Yessir!"

It's a pity humans don't often have such songs to cheer them on when work is difficult. It would come in so handy for people ranging from coal-miners to top executive assistants.

* * *

****I don't _recommend_ singing it, mind. As is well-known, the Dark Speech is a fearful thing and its unhallowed sound may corrupt the minds of weaker beings, as well as make people think you're drunk and trying to puke or else that you're horking up a hairball.


	13. Chapter 13

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14, 2016)**

* * *

13

Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, and Ford had done everything they could to get ready for the ordeal. In addition to donning their gas masks, the four humans had removed as much clothing as decently possible, had wrapped discarded shirts and handkerchiefs and such around their heads, and had soaked those and everything else they wore in water from one of the canteens.

The Wandering Dude took no special precautions, made no preparations, because as he said, it wouldn't matter, anyway.

For most of the trudge back, the ambient temperature in the Crawlspace stood a tad over fifty degrees Celsius—about 123 in Fahrenheit degrees—and the evaporation of the water in their soaked garments helped to cool them a little. Ford knew, but none of the others (except possibly Dipper—you never could tell with him) that humans could just manage to survive temperatures in that range if they moved slowly and carefully and rested whenever they could.

At a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit, though, the body began to give up. Nobody could take that for more than ten minutes or so. And the temperature very probably would get at least that high as they neared their goal.

On the other hand, it was, as they say, a _dry_ heat. Dry heat is supposed to be more bearable and comfortable than heat coupled with high humidity, but as the old prospector remarked one sunny day in the Mojave Desert while looking at his poor sweating donkey, "Dry heat, my ass!"

Ford had explained they needed to go through the main market cavern and then into the just slightly smaller one called Sadist Square—that was where the monster armaments-and-ammo shops were, as well as the stands that sold things like badly-printed pamphlets with titles like _What To Do on a Rainy Day: 1001 Fun Uses for a Stiletto, Join the Club: The Journal of Cudgels,_ and _Crossbows Compared._ And the shops also stocked camouflage hunting clothes and printed targets meant to be nailed to a post or pinned onto the backs of your prey. Stuff like that.

The journey wasn't really all that far, but they took it slow in the swelter. Ford had warned it was vital to stay hydrated, so they all took repeated swigs from the canteen that Wendy carried, the water increasingly unpalatable as it warmed. Even so, they swallowed it, though their lips began to feel dry moments after a drink.

After passing through another short, arched tunnel into what felt like a blast furnace, they finally emerged in Sadist Square, the off-chamber of the Crawlspace where the creature wallowed in its pool of liquid rock, a crater some four yards in diameter—and the glare from the bubbling, superheated lava was so fierce that they couldn't approach any closer than about a hundred feet, and then to bear it, they had to hunker down behind a jumble of fallen rock (it had been I'M STEEL STANDING, an armor shop, before it collapsed).

As they huddled there, the Wandering Dude spoke: "This is as far as you can make it. I'll go up and take a closer look."

"Won't it hurt you?" Ford asked him, gasping.

"Oh, sure," the Dude said in a flat voice. "But life hurts, doesn't it? And I'll heal even if I burn away to a teeny pile of ashes. It's happened before. Just takes time"

Mabel took his hand. "Hey, I like you. Let's be careful out there." The ancient man nodded solemnly.

Ford thought for a moment. "I've become extremely accurate with my quantum destabilizer," he said. "At this range, if I can get a clear shot at its—I suppose it has a head—then I can probably fatally wound it with one shot, perhaps even dispatch it outright. Can you induce it to raise its head over the crater rim, do you think?"

The Dude stood and shrugged. "I can try."

"Then good luck."

The wispy old man walked forward, treading carefully to avoid the worst of the fallen, shattered rock. They watched him go.

"Man," Wendy said. "I wish I could get one good whack at it with my axe!"

"I'm not sure even a paranormal axe could take the direct heat," Dipper said. "Not the handle, anyhow. Look at all the stalls and booths."

He had noticed that every wooden structure in the place had charred—not actively flamed, from the look of it, but had blistered, blackened, cracked, and shattered under the steady radiance of heat.

Something hot dripped on his arm, and he reflexively brushed an oozy black spot off. "What is that?"

Ford turned a narrow-beamed flashlight upward. The whole ceiling glistened black. "My hypothesis," he said, "is that the shops augment the natural illumination down here with tallow candles and lamps. Over hundreds of years, a layer of greasy soot has built up on the ceilings. Now it's all melting away."

"Yuck," Wendy said. "It's getting all on my skin."

"Mine, too," Mabel said. She raised up and peeked over the edge of the rocks before ducking down again, away from the dazzling heat and light. "He's almost there."

Dipper risked a quick look, too. The Dude came to a halt within twenty feet of the molten pool, an arm shielding his eyes. His body was visibly smoldering. He stooped, picked up a rock, and threw it into the pool, with no visible reaction. He did so twice more, then stood on tiptoe, took a long look, and then, surprisingly, turned his back on the pool and came hurrying back, even stumbling a little.

He ducked behind their low rampart, groaning. His few clothes had burned away, and his exposed skin showed corrugated, red-blistered in places and blackened in others. "Sorry to be indecent," he murmured, covering himself with his ravaged hands. "First, may I have another sip of water?"

Wendy held the canteen to his cracked lips, then when he had drunk, she took off the green shirt she had worn like a turban over her head. "Use this," she said kindly.

"Thank you," the Dude said, wrapping it around him. "Stanford Pines, I can't make the creature raise its head. It does have one, but it won't look at me. Or anything, I think. It's like an enormous snake made of nearly molten rock. And it's all coiled up tight now, not moving, not intending to move. And it's not alone."

"There are two of them?" Ford asked. "Wait—are they mating?"

"No, there's only one," the Dude said. "Wait—mating—where did you get that idea?"

"One researcher posits that some supernatural creatures, like ordinary ones such as eels or salmon, return to the places where they were born to mate and spawn. What was the researcher's name? Kamen? Darren Kamen? Daremo? This heat makes it hard to think—I just can't recall at the moment."

"It's not mating," the Dude said. "But I know what it is now, and I think what will happen soon will make it easier to kill."

* * *

The area around the teleportation hut had been cleared, for a certain definition of "cleared." The place still looked like a toddler's bedroom after he or she had finished obeying the parental command, "Pick up your toys!" In other words, the big stuff was mostly rolled out of the way. The little stuff, rocks and pebbles you might call the green Army guys and matchbox cars of the geological set, still littered the floor.

Mr. What's-His-Face was on his last legs. Even the oxygen he had stored in his skin sacs had been used up, and he tottered and staggered. "Mr. Mister Kobold," Bikfahrt said, "I don't think Mr. What's-His-Face can do the transportation ritual. You go with him and see if you can take him up to the surface. Once you go, Phrappf will take Horker."

"Boss, you're coming, too!" Phrappf said.

"No. You heard the Daughter of Men. We leave no man behind. But I'll be along directly. Go, Mr. Mister Kobold, quickly! Mr. What's-His-Name can't last long!"

They more or less shoved the two into the hut, or outhouse—this was a duplicate of the one on the surface—and after a heartbeat, the whole thing juddered and a flash of actinic blue-white light, like a pet lightning bolt, leaped out of the cracks between the old boards. Pfrappf opened the door. "They've gone," he said. "Hope they reached the surface."

"You next," Bikfahrt said. "Take Horker. If you make it, set him down somewhere concealed to rest and then come back and let me know for sure that it's working."

"Yessir!"

Again the hut shuddered and flashed. And then a few moments later, it did so one more time. Phrappf opened the door, beaming. "We did it, sir! Straight to the top, and you won't believe how fresh the air is, how cool!"

"Then go back. And Pfrappf—if you never see me again, you've been a good Chop. Find my wife and daughter if you can and—help them any way possible."

"Sir," Phrappf said, his expression one of dismay, "let me stay here with you."

The Kersanzi Kuzpa shook his head. "You don't want that."

The Chop officer swallowed hard. "No, sir, I don't. But sometimes, uh, well, you know, doing what you hate to do is just the thing you _ought_ to do."

"Sorry, Phrapph. You gotta get back to the surface and make sure the Gnome, and the whatever Mr. What's is, and Horker, they all get to safety. Take them to the Mystery House that Stanford Pines talked about. That's a direct order. I'll get out with the rest of our—" he paused and then, not having found a preferable word, said, "our . . . friends, Phrappf! I'll come back with our _friends_ , or not at all."

"Sir—I'll see Horker and them safe to that Mystery Shack, right, but then I'll come back and stand by the hut up top. Help you all when you get back. Oh—when you come through, jump outside as soon as you get there. The damn thing topside really stinks." He opened the door of the hut and then paused to look back. "Sir—sorry, got to say it—it's been an honor serving with you."

"JUST GO!" screamed Bikfahrt in his loudest, most unpleasant way. But he was grinning, and his eye streamed not just from the stinging fumes.

Phrappf smiled, stood at attention, saluted—and then just went.


	14. Chapter 14

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14, 2016)**

* * *

14

As the Maul Chops were uncovering the teleportation hut, the three teens, Ford, and the Wandering Dude had retreated to a side tunnel shielded from the direct radiant heat of the crater.

The air in their refuge was even a little cooler—only 100 degrees versus 120—because an air chimney directly overhead led at least a half-mile up to a very distant surface—the opening looked like a star—and the very hot air streamed up this with an audible moaning sound.

Unfortunately, it was clear to them all that, despite the chimney's vertical climb to daylight, it was far too small for them to creep through. And too long—maybe two thousand feet or even more from where they were to wherever the shaft reached the outside world.

As they drank more water and rested, the Wandering Dude had told Ford what he thought the creature must be. Ford thought about that. "Of course, I've read the old legends," he said. "But—well, this is preposterous! However, it's true that if it's paranormal, that's only to be expected. Where did you first hear this story?"

"Um, in Arabia Felix, I believe," the Dude replied.

"Where the cats come from!" Mabel said, perking up at the word "felix."

Ford gave her a blank look. "Cats?"

"Well, it stands to reason, doesn't it?" Mabel asked, "All that sand? It's a natural!"

"Mabel," Dipper said, "what Mr., uh, the Dude is saying is that he believes the Rumbelow is like a phoenix."

"But wait, that's a bird, isn't it?" Wendy asked.

"In legend it is," Ford agreed. "However, we need more information—did the very old stories you heard say it was a bird or a reptile?"

"I think not either," the Dude said. "It is a long story, so I'll have to go on for a bit. Let me see—I had not been long on my journey when I got caught in one of the wars that swept through that part of the world. I wasn't fighting, just a bystander, understand, when armed men came storming into our village.

"In the fighting, I was mortally wounded, but recovered on the battlefield as the soldiers—" he frowned. "Harappans, I believe, though I'm not sure, it happened so many times, over and over—anyway, some soldiers scouring the battlefield for loot came upon me and forced me to carry their burden for them. Their commander confiscated me from them and later sold me as a slave. I can't recall all the details, lot of shuffling around, you know, and in the temporary, I wound up—"

"In the temporary what?" Dipper asked.

The Dude shrugged. "Oh, you know—someone else might say 'in the end,' but to me it's all temporary and never an end to it. Anyway, I wound up serving a wealthy scholar in Arabia Felix."

"Where the cats come from," Mabel put in. Dipper rolled his eyes.

"There were some cats, yes," the Dude agreed. "But as I was saying, the scholar wasn't a harsh master, and he wanted me mainly to keep his papyrus scrolls in order and to teach him cuneiform. Then one day he received a message and got very excited. It said that the fabulous creature he had written and spoken about, the one that even he thought was only a myth, had been sighted by some nomads who believed it had nested in the remote sand hills in the great desert. They gave him the name of an oasis—I don't remember it now—and he determined to journey thither to—"

"Thither?" Mabel asked. "Isn't that like a musical instrument?"

"That's 'zither,'" Dipper told her. " 'Thither' means 'to there.'."

"It's old-fashioned," the Dude admitted. "Thinking of old times, I tend to slip back in language."

"It's all right," Ford said impatiently. "You and the scholar went to—"

"The oasis, first. Not a large place, and the well was really a spring that came from deep in the earth and made a pool about half a _plethron_ across. There were odd little fishes in it, I remember. A finger long, red on top, pale green on their stomachs. I never saw them anywhere else in the world, and two or three thousand years later when I was a slave with a Crusader army that got lost in the desert, I led them to the oasis only to find out the spring had dried up and there was no water and no fish. Everyone died. I was very lonely—"

"What," Ford said, taking a deep breath, "did you discover about the creature?"

"Creature? Oh, the, um—well, as I said, we journeyed from the oasis two days' march into the desert, or I should say two nights, because it was too hot to travel during the day, so we moved at night, even though there were vipers that came out at that time, and one of our bearers was bitten and died—I'm sorry, lot on my mind. Let me concentrate." The Dude closed his eyes and then began again.

* * *

The place we came to (he said) was a vast sort of bowl surrounded by low stony hills. The creature had made itself a molten-rock nest in the center of the bowl. We could see the heat rising from it in writhing waves as we topped the ridge.

This was long before telescopes. The scholar wanted a close view of the creature, since he had researched the old, old legends about it and thirsted to know everything. He had told me—by this time I had served him for at least twenty years, and in some ways he thought of me less like a slave and more like an old friend of his that he occasionally beat when angry, and he had educated me in his own language as I had taught him the art of wedge-writing—um.

Anyway he had told me that the ancient stories said the creature appeared only once every five hundred years. And he was determined to come close to this one, so he would be the first to record a complete description of it. The bearers refused to approach, saying it was a holy thing and anyway they were scared of it and also it was hot enough to kill them.

So my scholar and I went down into the valley. Just like this one now, that creature had melted stone to make itself a crater in which to rest. The stone on that occasion was sandstone—you wouldn't think it would melt like lava, but it does, and leaves behind an extraordinary substance, a kind of crude glass, that breaks into wickedly sharp fragments. Some of the best sacrificial knives were made from—anyway.

We got to within about thirty strides of the crater and the scholar could stand no more. His garments were scorching. I thought I could go nearer, and he made me do that. I stood on a boulder where I could see into the crater and described what I saw. The creature was tight-wound and glowing, just like this one is now. I called back everything that I observed.

And then—there was a great flare of heat. I had no shelter from it, and it burned me to a crisp. I lost consciousness.

When I recovered, as I always do from a fatal injury, the scholar and his crew were nowhere to be seen. Nor was the creature. I went to the crater, now quite cool, and found that the melted rock within it had been transformed into hard obsidian.

I walked back to the oasis—it took me a week, and me with no water. I've been thirsty ever since, I think. Anyway, in the oasis a few of them recognized me and told me the scholar had returned home many months before. I thanked them. I had no money, nor even clothing, for my own had been burnt away, but some of them took pity on me and gave me some cast-off rags and a little food and let me drink from the spring.

What was I to do? I went back to the town near the sea where the scholar lived. He was astonished to see me because he'd thought I was dead. He was much changed—the flame had burned off every hair on his head and face and had scarred his forehead and cheeks. The hair never grew back, but he wore the scars like medals.

He told me he had not been idle, and in the time since last I had seen him, he had written up the tale of the creature and of what happened, and he let me read it. It was mostly accurate, though told at second hand and had many errors. I corrected a few things and as I read, I learned that after the explosion—the burst of heat, I mean—the creature had vanished. Its whole body had been consumed in that flash, burned away. My scholar estimated that in life it was ten paces long. But its entire body apparently was consumed in hatching its egg.

For that was what I had seen in the very center of the crater, and what I saw again in the one here in the Crawlspace: a pumpkin-sized egg that gleamed like diamond. It requires great heat to hatch, I think. And when it hatched, a small wormlike creature emerged—well, small in relation to the parent, only about an arm's length, and much cooler. It shot out of the smoking nest and burrowed into the solid rock not far from the nest and the scholar lost sight of it.

It moved so fast that he said it flew across the sand. That was only a metaphor, but over the centuries later scholars took it too literally. My scholar called the creature a _faonakikes_. In his tongue, that was a made-up word from his people's words for "serpent" and "sun." He believed that the creature absorbed the heat of the sun, though I think he was wrong about that. Anyway, a thousand years or more later, when I was a captive and a slave in a Greek household, I discovered their learned men spoke of a Phoenix, a bird, that when it grew old made itself a nest and burned itself to death and then emerged new-born from the ashes as a kind of worm.

I recognized my old scholar's sun-snake and figured out that his metaphor—the _faonakikes_ "flew" over the sands—had fooled everyone. I told the man who owned me that everyone was wrong, that it was more like a serpent than anything else, though it was not that, either, and he had me killed as a lesson to the other servants not to meddle in philosophy. It took me ages after that to dig my way out of the hollow he'd had me buried in. They had piled great big stones on me.

Life's a funny old thing. You try to be helpful, and see what you get.

* * *

After the Dude finished his story, a silent Ford stared at him wordlessly for a few seconds. Dipper coughed. That seemed to stir his great-uncle into awareness again.

"The Phoenix," Ford said. "The Phoenix isn't a bird, but a kind of—of reptile, or reptiloid—"

"Made of stone," the Dude said. "Living stone. Except it can't move unless it's always hot enough to be on the verge of melting."

"It burns up its old form when it gets too large," Ford mused, "and then re-emerges in a smaller form and burrows down—as far as the Earth's mantle? And lives in magma and grows as it—what? Eats? Absorbs heat? There's so much that we don't know!"

He grew aware that Mabel was tugging his sleeve. "Grunkle Ford?" she asked.

"I—yes, Mabel?"

"You're not gonna kill it, are you?"

He blinked. "I believe you were the one who wanted to slay the monster. Pew, pew, if I recall correctly."

"Yes," she said, squirming a little. "But, Grunkle Ford—I didn't know it was gonna be a _baby_!"


	15. Chapter 15

**Rumbelows**

 **(July 14-16, 2016)**

* * *

15

From what he understood, Ford thought it would be vital to find a place sheltered from the full effect of the, well, call it "hatching."

"The Maul Chops' place!" Mabel said.

"I doubt we have time," Ford said.

"I know," Dipper said. "The Underground River Bank—the vault!"

"But don't lock the door this time," Mabel said.

"Erm," said the Walking Dude, "I could stay outside the vault. I don't think the bank itself would be vaporized, and I'd have some protection in the inner offices. If you have the key to the vault—"

"It's a combination lock!" Dipper said. "We'd better hurry." The seismic rumblings had become almost constant, and he had an urgent sense that something drastic was going to happen at any moment.

He remembered the way, though since their freeing of Winziger, the whole plaza had become littered with dropped rubble and a few roasted bats. They entered the bank—the outer door, made of strong, thick oak bound in iron bands, crumbled away, having been charred by repeated blasts of superheated air. But the inner rooms, as the Dude had thought, were intact and not badly scorched. Ford, Wendy, and Mabel piled into the vault. Dipper showed the Dude the rune-inscribed keypad and taught him how to press in the combination—which he also wrote out on the door of the vault itself, in permanent marker. "They'll have to change this later," he said.

The Dude practiced and got the door open with no trouble. "How about you?" Dipper asked.

"I've closed three doors between here and the outside," he said. "I'll crouch down in the bathroom over there. I'll fill the sink with water and—"

"They've got running water?" Ford asked, peeking out from the vault.

"Hot and steam," Dipper said, glancing into the bathroom. "OK, we'll give you all our spare head wraps. You soak them and then stuff them in all the cracks of the door. Good luck!"

"You, too," the Dude said. "It won't be long now."

Dipper got into the vault. Ford's electric lantern was on, and he noticed that the other three had taken off their gas masks. Dipper pulled his off, too. "Shouldn't we keep these on?"

"Not until we have to have them," Ford said. "We've got maybe two hours of air in here, maybe more. I'm keeping a CO2 reading going. If it gets critical, we'll go to oxygen—good for another six hours. We want to give ourselves as much time as possible."

Wendy shook her head. "Man, you know we're gonna run right up the limit. It always happens!"

"In that case," Ford began, "we—"

They felt the whole world shake. A shelf full of trays tipped over, and strange coins jangled and rang as they cascaded to the floor. Even through the thick stone walls and heavy iron vault door they heard a sustained rush, as though a tornado had broken loose. Heavy things crashed outside. And then—silence.

Minutes crawled by. Dipper tilted his head. "I hear something!"

 _Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick,_ and then the _scree_ of the door handle moving. They all helped the Dude, and the great vault door opened. "Has it happened?" Ford asked.

The Dude nodded. "All over. We can get back to the transportation huts, I think, if we go left. Don't go right—the floor and walls and ceiling that way are all red-hot."

So much smoke roiled in the Crawlspace that even Ford's lantern had little effect. They bent low and went as fast as they could through suffocating heat—and as they reached the passageway to the exit, the Dude tugged on Ford's sleeve. "Behind us, if you want to see."

They stopped and turned. At first Dipper had the panicky thought that a crack had opened and magma was showing through—but then he realized he was looking at something living crawling on the floor. It glowed red-hot, and it had a bulbous head and a serpentine body about three feet long. It looked, vaguely, as if a dozen gerbils had decided to celebrate Chinese New Year by getting inside one of those dragon costumes and trotting along.

"Aw," Mabel said. "It's so lethal! I just want to cuddle it!"

"There it goes," the Dude said.

The creature reached a spot that, presumably, it liked, and dipped its head down, pressing it against the floor. Which bubbled. The infant Rumbelow melted a burrow into solid rock and squirmed down it, out of sight.

"Shoulda blown it away, Dr. P.," Wendy said. "Save trouble after."

"Well," Ford said, "the trouble won't return for another four to five hundred years. And the legend says there's only one of these at any given period—though I doubt that's true. And I can't return life to one if it's dead—so it's not fair to take life from one that isn't. Let's go."

They found Bikwidge sprawled unconscious but breathing. Ford sent Dipper and Mabel up. They found Pfrappf pacing near the surface outhouse, told him the situation, and he want down. Moments later, he and Ford re-appeared, dragging the woozy Bikwidge into the fresh air. Ford supported him, and Wendy got him a drink of cool water from the creek that ran not far off the trail.

He opened his eyes and tried to focus. Mabel wiped his forehead with a wet cloth. "See?" she said quietly. "We never leave a man behind."

Even after the drink, Bikvidge's voice came out as a croak: "Daughter of Men, I think many changes have come this day. Is the monster dead?"

"It's gone, dude," Wendy said. "Hey, man—sorry about your hand."

Bikwidge held up the stump, which had already scarred over. Already four little bumps showed, where a thumb and four fingers would grow back. "I have had worse," he said. "And it was worth it to meet a fiery-haired monster like you! Have you ever thought about going into police work?"

Wendy laughed. "No way. I couldn't compete with you and your men."

"That is . . . kind," Bikwidge said. "Well—how are things down there?"

"Not good," Ford said. "Sadist Square is semi-molten from the heat. I don't think any of the businesses there survived—everything will have to be built from the ground up. Your Hindquarters and jail are safe. The main cavern—well, lots of damage, and it will be weeks before it's cool enough for your people to return."

"What is to be done with us?" Bikwidge said. "Imprisonment?"

"No!" Mabel said. "No way! We'll find somewhere safe for you. And the Gnomes can get the word out to everybody who evacuated. You'll see."

"Can this be done?"

Dipper put his arm around Mabel's shoulders. "If my Sis says it can—you can count on it, Sarge."

"What is Sarge?"

The Dude said, "It's a term of respect, sir."

"Then thank you—Sarge," Bikwidge replied to Dipper.

* * *

The Gnomes traveled fast and traveled everywhere and knew everyone. Once Mabel called in Jeff and explained what they needed, the refugee program got rolling.

The Gnomes got in touch with the Manotaurs. The Manotaurs discovered they quite liked the Huruk H'ai. Even their women were manly. And not far from the Man Cave were other natural caves where the Huruk H'ai could shelter.

The various other monsters could find temporary homes with the feral Gnomes (for the smaller creatures), on Handwitch Mountain (for the human-sized ones), and in the forest (for most of the rest). Winziger made the rounds, taking inventory. One by one, all the missing were accounted for—apparently the Rumbelow had caused no casualties.

On the third day, Jeff led Win to sixteen Huruk H'ai who were sheltering in a rocky glen in the woods, three of them Maul Chops, the rest families, and an overjoyed Bikwidge soon celebrated a reunion with his wife Khleava and his little daughter Myrtle. He showed his stump to his wife, who oohed and aahed over it. A Huruk H'ai woman always admired a Huruk H'ai man who could show a combat scar, and now her husband had a nifty one. The regenerating hand would even be a different color from the rest of him, a deep emerald green instead of an olive color. It was a green badge of courage, and it made her love him all the more.

The Huruk-H'ai liked the Manotaurs, and for the time being, they settled in as neighbors, enjoying such physical activities as "Catch the Boulder" and "Body Slamming." Maybe they were games, but nobody kept score.

* * *

Teek at first hugged Mabel and kissed her more times than she could count ("Twenty-one," Win told her later), and then scolded her for having gone off on the adventure without him.

"Next time," she promised him, and returned every one of his kisses, with, as Win said, a healthy rate of interest.

* * *

Stan blew up at Ford: "You took Wendy along, you knucklehead? What if she'd got hurt down there?"

"Stanley," his brother told him, "Think. This is Wendy, and she knew that Dipper was trapped underground. Would you refuse her?"

"I s'pose not," Stan admitted. "But I'm a coward. You're the hero!"

"No, Stanley, you're the hero. I told you that a long time ago. You'll fight anything if it threatens our family. Me, I'm just so interested in phenomena like these that I forget to be scared."

"Yeah, well, I'm too dumb to be scared. So we're a perfect match, Poindexter! Pines! Pines! Pines!"

Ford laughed and joined in their old boyhood chant.

* * *

The Wandering Dude had some three hundred years of American history to catch up on. Soos told him everything he knew, and Dipper decided he'd try to straighten out the details later.

The Dude liked beer, soap operas on TV, and marveled at cars and the Mystery Tram. He knew some real old-fashioned gambling games, and he and Stan had some good times down at the Skull Fracture.

His burns healed over a twenty-four-hour period, Soos got him clothes at the Sprawl-Mart, and the Ramirez kids started to call him "Pop-Pop." He told them horrific tales that they enjoyed and recited old rhymes and nursery tales about a decapitated queen wiv 'er 'ead tooked underneath 'er arm and a brave hero who slaughtered a cannibalistic monster, only the monster's mum came round and lodged a complaint against him later. The kids loved it.

As to future plans, the Dude said he didn't know what he would do. Probably travel. You could get anywhere in time, and he had plenty of time.

But instead Soos suggested he settle in at the Shack for at least a while. "You know, we could use a handyman," he said. "And you're, like, perfect! You can get electrocuted and still finish the job!"

The Dude liked Soos and Melody. He thought over the offer. "Well," he said, "maybe for a while."

* * *

Wendy, Mabel, Dipper, and the Dude agreed to be debriefed, and they told their stories to Ford, who recorded them along with observations on the Rumbelow, a possible source for the legend of the Phoenix. Though, he added in a long footnote,* he had also seen evidence that there was an actual firebird, or Phoenix, an avian creature that had a similar life cycle to the Rumbelow's and so Ford left for later investigation the question of whether the Phoenix (the bird) had been magically created by some great sorcerer or just happened.

Winziger met the Gnomes—the oldest of the tribe sort of remembered him from many, many decades ago—and told his story to crowds of them. One of them, a very attractive female Gnome, no longer exactly young but certainly not old, visited him and even helped him as he took the census of survivors.

"What will you do when it's safe to go back?" this Gnome, Vasillia, asked him.

Win shrugged. "Oh, well, you know—I'm the Director of the bank there. The businesses depend on me. I'll have to go back to work."

"Do you live down there?" she asked.

He sighed. "Yes, I have a small room in the bank. It's probably a wreck, though."

She sat closer to him. "Will you need help in cleaning it?"

He blinked at her. "I—well—um. Are you, um—offering?"

She smiled and leaned even closer. "I'm offering. I have a nice tree house, by the way, not too far from the transportation huts. Since Mom and Dad retired, there's only me there now. Plenty of room, beautiful views if you'd like some fresh air for a change. And you could commute to work."

Win swallowed hard. "But if I moved in, uh, we'd—have to be—um. Married."

She was so close. And her eyes were so bright. "Are you offering?"

And before Win's brain could engage, his heart spoke through his mouth: "Yes! Yes! If you'll have me!"

Gnome courtships normally last about four years. This one set a world land speed record.

And when they announced their plans, Jeff—who happened to be Vasilla's cousin—said, "You know, Winziger, if you're so good with numbers, we're earning money now, but we can't account it. If you'd like an additional job—"

Funny how things work out.

* * *

Dipper and Wendy told Manly Dan all about the events underground. "But you're all right?" he kept asking, leaning forward, massive hands on massive knees, his perpetual scowl making him look intimidating.

"We're fine, Dad."

Dipper held her hand, right there in front of her father. "Mr. Cor—"

The hands balled into fists. "DAN!"

"Um, sorry, Dan, you should've seen Wendy. She went up against a monster maybe two feet taller than you. And it tried to smash her, and with one stroke, she chopped its hand off."

"Really?" Dan beamed. "That's my baby girl!"

Wendy sighed. "Yeah, but I felt bad about it later. I apologized to him when he woke up."

"Woke up? He fainted from havin' his hand chopped off? What a wuss!"

"No . . . Dan," Dipper said. "Wendy knocked him out by head-butting him."

The Corduroy house rocked with approving, bellowed laughter.

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines** : _Some adventures end in glory. Some in defeat. Some . . . well, some just end. The Rumbelow came, did what it always has done, and went away again. Whether the small one we saw was an actual baby or not is a question to be explored._

 _Ford says he thinks there may be only one Rumbelow. Over the years as it made its way through the Earth's mantle, it accumulated layers of minerals until it grew too big and ponderous to function. Then, as it does once every 450 to 500 years, it came to the caverns and generated heat to melt the coating away and emerged at its proper size—only about a meter long—and resumed its life far, far below the surface._

 _Or, maybe, the original one really laid a crystal egg and burned its old body to nothing, and the heat caused a new one to hatch out. Mabel says it should be that way, just because she likes the idea of baby monsters. And maybe she's right. Maybe she and Ford are both wrong. We may never know._

 _However, knowledge is not a destination to be reached, but a horizon to head for. Wisdom comes not in the arrival, but in the journey._

 _The Crawlspace will be repaired and the monsters will return there to do their barter and trading. Win has already gone back once to change the combination to the vault. He says Sadist Square is still uninhabitable, but the air is clearing and things are cooling down everywhere. With the help of the Gnomes, the Manotaurs, and humans, before the end of summer, the monsters and freaks will be going back to put things right. Except maybe from now on they'll be more open to visitors._

 _Monsters. Freaks. I think I can use those terms without being prejudiced. Yeah, those who call the Crawlspace their own are all monsters and freaks. But I think on this trip I learned something._

 _Sure. they're monsters and freaks—but deep down, where it counts—aren't we all?_

* * *

*Footnotes, don't you just hate them?

* * *

 _The End_


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